I called Toys R Us last Thursday, trying to find a pair of Hulk Hands for the only person on the face of the Earth above the age of ten who would think this was the perfect Valentine’s Day gift. When I finally got through the menu tree, the phone was answered by a woman who rattled out, “Thank you for calling Toys R Us, where the magic begins” Imagine if you had to say that every time you answered the phone. Diane made it clear through her delivery that she would rather not have to say that.
I worked at the Crabtree Valley Pizza Hut my senior year in high school. In addition to being forced to wear the world’s most uncomfortable garment “a red-and-black zippered polyester smock that looked like something a Yugoslav hairdresser might wear to a disco”, I was instructed to answer the phone with, “Thank you for calling Crabtree Pizza Hut. This is Dave speaking. How may I help you? I always felt as though I was making people wait, rather than being polite. I’m sure most people would have been fine with, “Pizza Hut. Shoot”
That particular Pizza Hut was owned by a tubby guy in his 40s with curly blonde hair who showed up at the restaurant early one Saturday evening sporting a pink track suit with a thick gold chain around his neck, and smoking a cigar. He and his besuited flunkies looked into our coolers and declared the pizza dough hadn’t risen enough, and directed us to throw it out and start over. Knowing that if we did so, we would find ourselves in the difficult position of being unable to serve any pizzas that night, “”Try to push the cavatini”” we smiled and nodded and ignored him. When he and his posse returned from dinner at the adjacent Steak & Ale, they looked in the coolers again, at the same dough they had rejected an hour earlier, and grunted their approval, certain that their managerial intervention had averted a crisis. I can hardly express how often I have relearned that same lesson in one way or another since.
I left that job just before I graduated, and when I gave my notice the manager made a concerted effort to talk me out of going to college, offered me an assistant manager’s job, and assured me that I would be manager within a year. I declined, and the job went to Steve, who worked there 80 hours a week and also spent his nights off at the restaurant, wearing a brown suede shirt that had laces instead of buttons, drinking pitchers of beer and playing the Ms. Pac Man game by the front door. Clearly he wanted it more than I did.
I had gotten a similar offer a year before when I left Golden Corral for the Pizza Hut job. “Twenty years later I can’t remember why I left one crappy restaurant job in favor of the other one, but there must have been a reason. Maybe I thought it would be better to come home stinking of pepperoni instead of steak. Or maybe I got tired of referring to the waitresses as “Steerettes”” In retrospect I realize that the manager of the Golden Corral, thanks to that corporation’s practice of giving managers a stake “no pun intended” in the profits, was almost certainly a millionaire by the age of 35 “he was already driving a Porsche 928 at 27”, and probably retired at 40. Thank God I dodged that bullet.