Camp Bullis Part 2

Bullis orders weren't just a pain in the ass for drivers.

Somehow, not a single soldier knew what building they were staying in. They weren't even named, they were numbered. A step outside ever would have solved the issue. We inevitably ended up delivering to the postal exchange building.

Since we delivered at timed intervals, this led to some fun experiences for drivers, at least. Jeremy would wait exactly 5 minutes at the PX and then leave, pizzas delivered or not. Jim, Jeremy, and Rob would often get back into their cars and cackle as they sped off, soldiers windmilling in the rearview.

Everytime I spoke to someone from Bullis, I was somehow physically accosted with idiocy. They mostly ordered for a large group of friends, and the stupidity on offer was offensive. Aside from not knowing where they slept, they had difficulty grasping pizza sizes, would often order 20 ounce sodas thinking that it was enough for multiple people, and never, not a single time, did they ask what everyone wanted ahead of time. The logisticians of the Air Force are astounding. The coordination necessary to organize the people and machines of a base and execute missions is mind-bogglingly impressive.

Not a goddamned one thought to check if their buddies wanted pepperoni or ham ahead of time.  

The couple times I got to ride along with Jeremy to Bullis were very instructional. The car wasn't typically searched, but getting to and then into the base was a nightmarish time sink for a job in which the hour was a very real loss of at least 20 dollars in tips. This is why every driver eventually instituted a strict 5 minute waiting period.

After witnessing firsthand the behavior of the soldiers, I made a conscious decision not to tell any of them about this time limit.  

But these extreme measures weren't enough to get the fuckers to tip. That's a story for next time on the Bullis Files.

The Scandal That Gently Rocked Nothing Of Consequence

Bobby was a buddy of Jim and Jeremy and I from high school. One time the four of us went to a movie at the Drafthouse and in the middle of the movie, a waitress approached Bobby, whispered something to him, then went out to the hall. Bobby got up and made out with the waitress for 20 minutes. They'd never met before.

What I'm saying here is that Bobby was stereotypically alpha. He had a magnetic appeal to women that meant he never had trouble sleeping with the ones of his choice.

I don't know why he chose to start fucking Natalie. My first instinct says to make his job easier, but I don't think he did any more work before he and the boss started shtupping than he did afterward. He flat-out admitted he wasn't physically attracted to her. I guess it doesn't really matter at this point. 

This is the sort of scandal that tears workplaces apart. People get fired, feelings get hurt, drama invades every employee's life no matter how disconnected they are, and eventually there is a breakdown. That's why every company in the world has rules against this sort of thing. 

Mahjong hummed along without the months-long tryst making a blip.

It is perhaps a testament to how chronically beyond fucked-up the business was run that when people found out about this, they shrugged their shoulders as if it was SOP. Jim and Jeremy informed me as if bored.  

"But...they do it here?!"

"Yeah, in the driver hallway." (The driver hallway was the only place in the store not covered by cameras, which made my nightly Dr. Pepper exceedingly easy)
 

"This is like really bad, you guys! Bobby's gonna get fired!" 

"I can't think of a single male from corporate who Natalie hasn't openly admitted to fucking." 

When I confronted Bobby about it, he was somehow even more nonchalant. 

"Well now when I show up drunk she won't say anything about it." 

These are the things that happen in your local pizza place whether you know it or not. People fuck a yard away from where the pizza is cut, leaning over the bags used to bring that pizza to you, in the name of the driver not getting hassled for drunk driving for a living.  

Have fun ordering pizza next time. 

Camp Bullis, Part 1

Mahjong didn't pay mileage to the drivers. Their money came from hourly wages (7.25 in the store, 4.25 on the road), tips (their real source of income) and the tiny stipend from the delivery charge (the entire delivery charge was 2.25, drivers got 50 cents of that for every order they took out). 

So right off the bat, it's apparent that taking multiple orders in one trip was pretty cost-effective and profitable. 

Now, the most universally reviled delivery amongst the drivers was the ones to Camp Bullis. The demand from Bullis for pizza was so high we had to take timed orders, one every hour from 3 to 10 or so, and there'd usually be 7 or 8 orders in each one. So why did drivers hate it so much?

It all has to do with why the demand was so staggering. Not a single other restaurant delivered to the army base. Let's take a look at the typical restaurant's delivery map radius.

It's a circle, generally speaking. Now let's look at Mahjong's map radius.

Ok this is pretty normaoooWHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SPIKE. That can't be normal. Bullis was 11 miles away from Mahjong. That's a 22 mile round trip, which wouldn't be so bad if every single denizen of Bullis wasn't an animal. 

Now I've covered the morality of tipping already, and I'm not saying that the soldiers at Bullis were bad people necessarily, but the army does specifically target 18 year olds because their morality is more easily malleable, rather than 24-26 year olds more likely to be in their physical prime.  

No one at Bullis ever tipped. I rode along with Jeremy a couple times to see it with my own eyes. This was a conscious decision on their parts. It was malice. I saw Jeremy hand these people their orders and the receipt to sign, and on the tip line, they wrote a 0 with a slash through it. When they handed it back and saw the look on Jeremy's face, they'd laugh and walk away with their pizza. 

The distance and their tendency to never tip had swiftly made every other restaurant stop delivering there, but Natalie saw only dollar signs.

Eventually this will be a story of triumph, of how the drivers trained the soldiers in the only way they understood. Until that time, though, Bullis is a seething bucket of the broth you would get from boiling maggots.

The Layout

(click to embiggen)

1 Front Door 

 Possibly the worst part of Mahjong. Not only did it bring me into the hellpit of my job, but it brought customers. I could see out of it at the cars passing by; the world untouched by hate. It also hosted a constant cavalcade of drivers cheerfully leaving the store and returning with cartoonish sacks with dollar signs full to bursting.  

2 Counter 

This is where I was the face of Mahjong and also the main staging area for me to wish cancer on anyone who didn't tip me.  

I wished for a lot of cancer.  

3 Oven 

This is where Mahjong's pizza went from cold, uncooked, sludge-filth to just sludge-filth. One of the two sources of overwhelming heat which made employment at Mahjong a human rights violation.

4 Make Line

The soulless assembly line of the store. Luckily, I managed to dodge learning to make pizzas for the first 8 months of my illustrious career.

5 Office

Tiny room for managers to sit in lamenting the fact that they made 9 dollars an hour, were 40, were having their souls eroded by an ecosystem of vicious capitalism, and that some unknown employee was ruining their shot at a bonus due to the massive losses incurred by daily Dr. Pepper theft.

6 Soda Cooler

The soda cooler. If it had any use other than keeping my Dr. Peppers cold, that information has been lost to time. Shamefully, the administrators of the cooler would allow all sorts of other sodas to clutter up the place.

7 Rack 

 The heat rack where pizzas were kept before being flung wildly at customers. Major social center, especially when an opportunity arose to beg for a mistake pizza.

8 Cut Table 

 This is where we pulled the pizzas from the oven and boxed them and cut them. It is also hell on earth.

9 Freezer 

 Cold room full of tubs of incredibly fresh pizza toppings, but mostly useful for standing in because being in Mahjong was akin to being on the surface of a dwarf star.

10 Bathroom

Repulsive room where I was forced to take communal shits with co-workers. To this day a container of my pee is in the ceiling.

11 Boxes

This is where we folded and stacked pizza boxes, most easy place to hide from real work.

12 Laundry Room

The laundry room where our sacred aprons were washed, but more importantly, one of the rooms where Natalie's homeless son Josh would sometimes sleep, and eventually the place where he would fuck girls.

13 Dish Sink

This is the place where late at night the closing team would idly spray hot water towards all the things that touch food throughout the day, in vague hopes of getting them clean.

14 Exit

The perfect place for Mahjong's resident smokers to congregate and never get bitched out; better place for me to set foot and get immediately chastized for doing no work.

15 Window Wall

The second source of supreme heat. Working in tandem with the oven, Mahjong utilized the technology of big fucking windows to harness every joule of heat toward the ultimate goal of making every workday feel like it took place inside a human being.

16 Driver Station

This is where the drivers were supposed to check out their deliveries, but instead cajoled, bullied, and conspired together to arrange deliveries in a fascinating form of tribal politics mostly centered around getting each individual favorable tips and fucking over Ron.

17 Bag Area

Perhaps my favorite part of the store, there was nothing particularly special about this area: it was where the heat bags were kept between deliveries. But I loved it because it contained the deepest testament to corporate incompetence I've ever seen. Right behind this bag rack, where drivers were constantly tossing empty bags, were the pair of switches which controlled the fans. The fans meant to keep the poison gases produced by the oven out of the regular gases required for everyday breathing.  

With just the slightest amount of foresight, this consistent line of conversation could have been avoided: 

"Hey, does it smell sort of like we're getting brain damage to you?" 

"Yeah, that's weird, I smell it too, like a faint soupcon of our kids having birth defects?" 

"Drivers must have accidentally hit the 'don't poison us all to death' switch."

Welcome to Mahjong!

It was July of 2009. I was 21, 22 in August, and if disillusionment with Mahjong hadn't set in by a combination of previous job experience and orientation, it seemed, they were going to do their damnedest on my first day.

Jim introduced me to Mitch, Joe, and Natalie.
Mitch was 18 years old and was set to attend MIT next year. He both did not belong at Mahjong and was my salvation when drivers were not in the building.

Joe was a handsome 20-something Hispanic man, the assistant manager on shift. He was very pleasant. I had no inkling that soon enough he would be one of the people I would fear for my life around.

And then there was Natalie. The general manager of the store, Natalie was about 30, made 40 by what I can only presume was early pregnancy, a life of drinking and smoking, and her heavyset frame. She was Hispanic, and her makeup was absolutely excellent, because I never would have guessed upon meeting her that she was cloven-hoofed.

Mitch was appointed to help me learn the order-taking system. I want to take a moment to make it clear that I consider myself reasonably intelligent and have grasped most electronic registers within about 20 minutes of fiddling with them.

The Mahjong registers were a shrine to poor design. It required going through 8 screens for the simplest of orders. Buttons were often labeled in inscrutable shorthand of an eldritch tongue. You had to skip through each category (pizza, sides, drinks, extras, sandwiches) for every order to confirm that they didn't want any of those things. And this is all when it worked perfectly.

Mitch got to take one actual order with me, trying to slow down his motions learned by rote enough for me to keep up without falling behind. Customers speak in rapid fire.

After the order was taken, Mitch had to jump to the assembly line to help Joe make the pizzas, because as worthless as I would certainly be on the phone, I would be worse than worthless at making pizzas.

When the phone inevitably rang, I answered with the official corporate-approved greeting. "Thanks for calling Mahjong, where we love our customers! Can I take your order?" This whitebread, insipid bullshit is so etched into my skull that even now, 3 years out of Mahjong, I have to fight instincts to answer the phone that way.

Turns out I couldn't take their order.

At one point, while Mitch ran between the pizza line and the phone to help me take an order, Natalie cocked her head out of the office door and shouted at him, no shit, shouted at him for helping me.

Jim, eyes locked on mine with a wicked grin, said, "You made Mitch stop helping him after one order." To which she responded, exasperated, "Well he's been here an hour!"

When, in the future, I tell you stories about how Jim was constantly abused, understand that the merry grin he gave me as he took his delivery out the door, the flippant "Welcome to Mahjong, Kevin!", understand why I believe he deserved every bit of it. I still swear I saw him hop up and click his heels together as he left the building.

The remainder of my 4-hour shift was a swirl of learning a new language and interacting with my co-workers. Joe is going to be his own little post down the line.

By the time I left that day, I'd begun to understand what I'd gotten myself into. Seeing the worthiness of the job, I stole a Dr. Pepper, and waited for my ride home.

Welcome to Mahjong.

An Introduction

These are the collected tales of my time at the Mahjong Pizza Company. No names have been changed to protect the innocent; there are no innocent. No details have been spared out of respect; I have none.

Jim is to blame for the entire damn thing. Just try to call him out on it, he will hem and haw about how he warned me what it was like, how I needed the money, he will do whatever it takes to escape moral culpability. But when you read my tale of woe, know this: Jim is to blame.

I'd been unemployed for four months. My enormous stash of ramen and tiny stash of rent money had both dwindled, and I needed to rejoin the ranks of the gainfully employed. Jim had worked at Mahjong for over two years by this time. He said he could get me a job there. He couched it in constant reminders that it was the worst place he'd ever worked, but I had reached the point of no return. In poverty, you are allowed no standards.

So an application was filed and good words were put in, the churning colon of employment at Mahjong was massaged, and an entire fucking month later, I was ready for orientation. Never mind all the terrible things a month-long hiring process indicates about a company; never mind the hiring manager boasted to me the company's near-100 percent turnaround; never mind every bit of it, I was a fresh-faced youth ready to live the capitalist dream. It was time to earn money, to become an integral part of my community and pay my rent as a self-made man.

The orientation was held in the district office, which was little more than a tiny office building adjoining a Mahjong. The batch of new recruits were here told about the list of benefits Mahjong provided:

No Vacation

No Health Insurance

No Raise Structure

No Paid Time Off

Alright, sweet, Texas is a right-to-work state, got it. Money's money, right? Time for our drug tests!

Except there's only one bathroom and we need to hurry this along, so ladies, line up at the bathroom, fellas, pick a cubicle and pee into this cup. I laugh at this, and the orientation manager gives me a dead-eyed smile. "Yes?"

It takes me a moment to realize he's not kidding, and I decided then and there it wasn't worth it. No, money is not money, we are human beings, we are entitled to the basest level of dignity, this is the line. I rallied the other new hires. "We're not going to huddle in a 3-walled, shoulder-high cubicle and pee for these fuckers! Today we take a stand! Worker's rights are human rights! Unionize!"

The only bright side to my year-long term of wage slavery with Mahjong is that no one saw my dick that day. Money's money, right?