A Very Rare Specimen Indeed...

Not to beat y'all over the head with more Papa John's stories, but I needed to share this. Something happened to me on Wednesday night that has only happened twice before in my entire history of delivering pizza. No, it's not being seduced by a girl. That's only happened once.

I start this story with an average delivery at the end of my night...I went to this semi-ghetto apartment and knock on the door, surrounded on three sides by what appears to be garbage. A kid answers the door, he's maybe 13 years old. The bill is $45.42, and he hands me $48. A bigger kid, maybe 15, asks him (never speaking with me) how much he gave me, and the littler kid says "I don't know, like $46." The 15-year-old is like, this won't do at all, so he digs around for some more money. The little kid tells me to wait and they continue searching for some money. Finally the 15-year-old comes to the door and give me $10 and asks for $4 back. "Alright", I'm thinking. I hand him the 4 bucks, and I go back to the store. Good tip to end a crappy night, or so I'm thinking.

About 20 minutes later, a woman calls the manager (the one who's leaving in 9 days, btw) and yells at him because I took "$5 extra". She says "$48 is enough of a tip", and was wondering very loudly why I asked for more. I told the manager that I don't ask for tips, and they just gave me extra money. She complains for a while, and the manager finally tells me I have to go give her the $5 back. I was flabbergasted, but what could I do? This was only the third time in years and years of pizza delivery that I've had to give a tip back. My mind raced back to the first two:

1. Scraggly man orders ham-pineapple pizza in Milwaukee, he receives pepperoni-pineapple pizza. It's understandable that he was upset (although the pepperoni-pinapple combo is not all that unusual among the taste-bud-less denizens of Dallas, especially if it involves jalapenos), but instead of getting his free extra correct pizza, he demands his check be returned to him by the driver, including tip. As I hand it to him, he says, "I don't mean to be an A__hole here," which helps cement on of my first rules of Human Interaction: Whenever someone starts a sentence with, "I don't mean to be a ____", you can know that they in fact do intend to be a ____.
2. In Dallas, I deliver a pizza that's supposed to be "light sauce" to an apartment. A quiet and lovely woman answers the door and hands me a some money. Soon after, a crazy man calls the store and demands his money back because the pizza had too much sauce on it. He sends his punching bag (wife? sister? girlfriend?) to the store to return the pizza and get all of her money back. I hand her the money, and she says, "I'm sorry." I don't say a thing. This woman was starring in her own lifetime movie, and is probably dead now. I don't want to think about it. Anyway, we open the pizza box and find the pizza destroyed -- none of it was eaten, and the sauce and toppings were smeared all over the inside of the box, as if a human being had ripped them off the crust in a fit of rage.

So I drove back and the 15-year-old answers, and looks surprised. He says, "No, you just have to give 4 dollars back," and I do that. This (either resourceful or just dumb) 15-year-old has secured me two extra dollars, since he gave me six extra to begin with and only got 4 back. The woman ended up paying me $50 -- how she like me now?

This is one of those things like the Ray Allen Trade or the Work Vacation Time Fiasco of Aug. 2004 -- if I think about them, I will just get unstoppably angry, because I have no recourse in these situations. Had she just come to the door and handed me $50 like a normal cheap person, I would have forgotten about her and the garbage on her porch. But since she's insane, she's now on my blog. And don't get me started on the manager. He needs to tell that lady we don't refund tips, especially since he's leaving in 9 days. Papa John's has so ingrained a hatred of employees into his head that he can't even stick up for them when he has no chance of being disciplined.