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!"

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."