Meet Natalie!

Natalie was the general manager of the store for the majority of the time I was employed with Mahjong. 

She was in her late 30's, and a fixture at the company. By every single account she'd slept her way to the GM position, and had apparently slept high enough that she was virtually unfire-able. Which seems like a solid way to run a business. Natalie was like bubblegum that you chewed, fucked, and then never got out of your pubes. 

As manager, Natalie's bonus structure incentivized behaviors like obsessively regulating stock, rationing hours to drivers and insiders with an eyedropper, and coming down with a hellwhip on people she didn't feel were being productive. This mind-numbing lack of knowledge of organizational psychology fell into one of two categories:

Hilarious when it happened to someone else. 

or 

Awful when it happened to you. 

The best part of Natalie's managing style was that she was constantly, constantly in the office. Her judgment of your productivity depended entirely on the 20 minutes she was out of it. My favorite example of this was the time Jeremy, in an effort to show me how easily impressed she was, said, "Watch this." 

When Natalie walked out of the office, Jeremy picked up a broom, spread his legs shoulder-length apart, and stood stock still holding the broom hamfistedly a foot above the floor, staring straight ahead with a glassy look in his eyes.

She jumped upon seeing him with broom in hand. "That's the initiative I like see Jeremy! He's getting extra hours next week!" She moved to the schedule and magnanimously scribbled in a 4 hour shift for him. Beaming with pride, perhaps a tear glistening in her eye, she returned to the office.

Jeremy had not moved a single hair the entire time. When she was firmly in the office, he tossed the broom aside, picked up an order, and left to deliver it.

There will be many stories to come about Natalie and her reign as head shill for Mahjong. But evidence exists, if you'll believe it, that she once felt emotions, perhaps even love.

And I will tell you the story of the precise moment I believe that that ceased to be true.  

Natalie was a cat-lover. A cat calendar was the sole personal touch that adorned the office (her son merited neither a picture nor keeping him in house past 15). It was pleasant to know there was something she loved outside of Mahjong. Humanizing.  

She once had a cat, a kitten really, which she'd stolen from a pair of friends. The pair had gotten the kitten addicted to cocaine as a lark, we're talking really fucked up stuff. Not cool people. So Natalie stole the kitten and over the course of the next few weeks, weaned it off the coke. She bought smaller and smaller amounts until it was well again, and grew to love the kitten.  

Fast forward another month or so, the cat was sick, so she rushed to the vet, leaving it overnight. The next day, the vet told her the kitten had feline AIDS, and that the best option would be to put it down. It was then that she got the call from her supervisor, the Area Manager, Lena (she has lots of stories in the future!). Natalie was needed immediately.  

She protested. The last of her humanity gave her the strength to cry out, she was about to send off a beloved friend.  

But Lena said if she wasn't there within 20 minutes she wouldn't have a job. Natalie sighed, and this is the moment we freeze frame on, this sigh. This sigh is the noise of capital eroding the human soul. No screams or whimpers or howls, just a sigh. It's the soul escaping, and the next noise you hear is the crinkling of the skin, as it is now simply a husk. This was the very second Natalie lost her spirit and became the Mahjong zealot.

Tips, and the massaging thereof

One thing I learned early on in my Mahjong career is that as an insider, I wasn't going to get tips. There was a tantalizing little line on the receipt I had customers sign, but straight up, the reason anyone ever places an order for pickup is so they don't have to tip.

The cultural mores of American society don't call for it. I understand why people don't do it. But it is an incredible, unbelievable boon to someone making minimum wage. Getting 3 dollars in a day meant the reality of taking in necessary calories to survive was the slightest bit easier. 

At the beginning, I had no rivals for tips, but eventually the competition for the meager sums people would occasionally let slip would drive me to a reasonable facsimile of the drivers's behavior, at one point culminating in me furiously shouting down a fellow insider, but that is Ray, and Ray is a different story for several posts in the future. 

After a couple weeks floundering around without getting more than a dollar here or there, Jeremy showed me a simple trick that increased my tips tenfold. 

"When you hand them the receipt, don't ask them to sign it. Tell them, 'Fill this out and sign it, please.'"

It was so subtle, it was beautiful. Masterful, even. I went very suddenly from getting a buck every couple days to averaging 4 to 7 dollars a day. This way they felt compelled to write on those two little lines, and even though it was mostly zero, a lot more people than before would write in a tip. 

I'm sure there's some sort of psychological experiment to be made here, but all I know is that this one line made me a dollar menu millionaire.

Driving: A Primer

To this day, if you walk into my old Mahjong, and crank your head directly to the right, you will see a poster encouraging you to join the team. Among the collage of ethnically diverse, smiling* men and women, there is a blurb espousing the apparently insouciant lifestyle of a driver.

"Do you want to drive around in your own car, listening to your own tunes? As a driver at Mahjong, you can get paid to be your own boss on the open road."

If you're picturing a man sliding over the front counter, pizza bag in hand, giving a cavalier grin before he settles into his car, then flooring it for the horizon with the Beach Boys cranked so he can make it home in time to take his best gal to makeout point, you haven't read any of this blog prior to this point.

The order queue system was about as simple as they come. First in, first out. You take the order at the top of the screen, which is the most recent, when you return your name goes at the bottom of the list. Somehow the drivers managed to turn this system into a hotbed of human indecency.  

Taking a double was common practice if it was busy, but if you took two orders when it was dead, even if they were right next door to each other, you might as well have had the mark of Cain.  

Drivers had an extraordinarily long memory for being burned. There was a form of politics at work that was fascinating to watch. Deals were cut, rivalrous teams were formed, misdeeds from six months ago were brought up, all with viciousness that would be at home on a battlefield. It ill-befitted men fighting for 4 dollars in tips. These were men fighting to live.  

The in-fighting wasn't simply to take more orders, either. It was to avoid known bad tippers, to seize known good ones, to take doubles or triples at unreasonable times, to foist particular orders upon particular drivers. Ron was often the perpetrator of such heinous acts, being a ruthless motherfucker. In return, he was often the victim when other drivers would team up. It was brutal social efficiency.  

Howard Zinn said: "I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: 'The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.'" 

Much in the posts to follow will revolve around the drivers and their exploits as they struggle to breathe in their boxcars. I maintain that you should never feel sorry for fucking drivers.

*Never witnessed in the wild.

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."

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?