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. 

Regarding Ron...

Ron was (still is) a driver for Mahjong. He was in his 30's, had a degree in both history and education, and an honorary degree in intense creephattery.

Ron seemed to have difficulty with concepts like "get to know someone the slightest bit before you sidle up behind them and massage their shoulders" or "don't continue conversations with me that you started with someone else without offering me any context" or "some people don't play World of Warcraft so this gibberish is completely meaningless to them". Now, rubbing up on total strangers is some USDA grade creep shit, but it was actually speaking with Ron that was jarring to me more often. 

There'd be times when I was cutting pizzas and Ron was talking to Jeremy. I couldn't hear them, but it was always pretty apparent that Jeremy was baffled beyond the capability for response. And when he would take a delivery out, Ron would saunter over and continue the conversation he'd started with Jeremy completely seamlessly.  

"Haha, that was pretty funny, man. Show me the fox." 

"I'm...sorry?" 

"Jeremy was trying to show me the fox." 

"You know I couldn't hear what you two were talking about, right?" 

"Yeah but I just wanted to say I agree. I gotta take this delivery. Make sure to tell Jeremy to show you the fox." 

About a third of conversations with Ron were mind-numbing non sequiturs with you trying to play catch-up in his hopscotch of madness, another third were him telling you all about World of Warcraft, and the last third were in-jokes he rarely shared with other people, like, "Show me the fox." 

After a couple weeks of prying, Jeremy and I found out that, "Show me the fox," was a product of one of Ron's blisteringly insane conversations. He was making a joke based on the idea that Jeremy was getting a tattoo of a fox tail sticking out of his butthole, as though a fox had burrowed into him.  

We resolved to start paying more attention when Ron talked.

But as creepy as he was, there was no denying that he also had a way of making you fear for your life!

One time, while folding boxes in the back, I noticed something tucked behind the electrical box for the store. I asked Jeremy what it was, and he walked over and pulled out an enormous fuck-off butcher knife. He explained that Ron kept it back there for reasons unknown. 



I decided eventually to confront him about it, and here is, as verbatim as I can recall, how that conversation went:  

"Hey Ron...I saw this, ah, knife, behind the electrical box in the back. Jeremy said it was yours." 

"Oh yeah, I always gotta have it back there." 

"Oh...why exactly?"

He looked at me darkly and said only, "Just in case."

At this point my pants were just filling with shit. I knew I was about to die. The smell of shit-fear was his trigger, he was going to strike. I could see how he'd do it, he was so much bigger than me, someone was going to clean the cornmeal-dredged shit off my dead--

"Gotta go! Show me the fox!"

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.

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.