[send From: dschen@armstrong (pts/40) at 17:49 9/7 To: boyd@hydra (pts/27) pizza? End of Message]I sent back an "ok" and a little later, he showed up at my office trailer with Mitch Klein. Elisabeth was there, working on the X terminal, and as we walked out Dan said, "Pizza?" to her. She said, "Yes, yes! Just hang on..." while frantically closing windows.
At the Pizza Hut, Dan immediately got interested in the pinball machine; we stood around him watching as he bounced the ball through all kinds of contorted chutes and bumpers. Sometimes it would give him another ball in the start chute and I'd fire it into play for him.
One of us said, regarding the waitress, "Doesn't she look kinda young - like she's 16?" I said, "Maybe even 12." She came over and seated us. "Would you like to order some drinks to start off?" she said perkily.
Elisabeth and I got Pepsis, Mitch ordered a Dr. Pepper, and Dan was still at the pinball machine. The drinks order seemed to confuse her for a moment, but I think she was fresh from Pizza Hut Academy and wasn't quite up to writing "Dr. Pepper" on her pad while being told, "Our comrade at the pinball machine would like a Pepsi."
Elisabeth's a vegetarian, and I believe Mitch doesn't like to eat greasy icky stuff like pepperoni, so we ordered a large pizza with peppers and onions. The waitress happily flounced off to the kitchen.
We speculated as to how old she was. One of us (I won't say who, to preserve his dignity) said, "Well, we could ask her. Like this --" and he suggested a rather salacious way of doing it. It was suggested that the question, phrased in that manner, would be somewhat threatening. Then it was suggested that the waitress might be even more unsettled if we had Elisabeth be the one to ask the suggested question, which was "Hey, baby! Are you jail bait?"
We started chatting about other things. I told a story about truly abysmal customer service in another industry.
A pilot for Braniff Airlines (which was commonly known for incourteous flight attendants and gate staff) went on some kind of business trip. On the way out, he flew on Braniff, and on the way back it turned out that his tickets were on another airline (Delta, I think). The Braniff pilot was frankly astonished at how polite and helpful the Delta crew were. A tight window to make a connecting flight? No problem -- we'll have a Delta van ready to whisk you over to your outgoing gate, and send your bags on ahead. More blankets, a pillow? No problem. Don't want to be bothered by beverage service? We won't wake you and we'll come back later.
When he got home, he wrote a letter to the Braniff V.P. for Personnel pointing out how much nicer the Delta staff were, and lamenting the fact that Braniff people were often surly and argumentative. The V.P. had the letter printed (leaving the author anonymous) in the company newsletter and, in an accompanying communique, blasted the staff for not doing a better job.
About four months later, that pilot was hitching a lift with his wife on a Braniff flight that ended at Braniff's hub in Fort Worth. The flight's captain sent word back with a flight attendant that, "Apparently you've done something bad; something's going to happen in the terminal". When the letter was first printed, the other employees had engaged in all sorts of sneaky detective work through the computer reservation system to find the author and when he got off the flight, the pilot and his wife were met by a huge shouting, taunting crowd of Braniff employees. Gate staff, ticket agents, baggage handlers, all of whom had left their posts all around the terminal and who formed a gauntlet of insults and abuse around the gate. The pilot at first tried to talk to them, but gave up and shepherded his wife to a taxi past the angry crowd.
The airline collapsed in 1982, partly due to its crippling debt load but due in no small part to the legion of business travelers and vacationers who had for years been reminding their travel agents, "Anybody but Braniff!" If your hub, which is supposed to be your showplace of efficiency and courtesy, is staffed by people like that then what hope can you have as an airline?
Now, we had been sitting in the Pizza Hut for what seemed to be quite a while. The Youthful Waitress came over and said, "Um, the cook broke the crust off your pizza, so we're gonna have him make another one. I'm sorry it's not ready yet." We said that would be ok, and I wondered aloud, "How can you break the crust off a pizza?"
It seemed to me that "breaking it off" usually applies to extended protrusions; for instance, you can break the side mirror off your car. However, you cannot "break the paint off your car", because that conjures up a nonsensical image of a completely bare-metal automobile sitting next to an empty car-shaped shell of enamel - something only a cartoon character should be able to achieve.
Then I figured it had to be something like the melted cheese and toppings sliding off the pie if you held it tilted, a condition describable as "shear stress failure", a term which I believe is familiar to seismic geologists but which failed to impress my dinner companions.
We were kind of upset by this time, because Mitch and I now had only 15 minutes to get to class and we'd all been sitting in this restaurant for half an hour just drinking soda. The waitress came back a while later with a pepperoni and onion pizza.
"But we ordered peppers and onions, not pepperoni and onions," we said.
"Do you want to eat this one anyway?" the waitress asked hopefully.
"See, no, the problem is that Elisabeth is a vegetarian, so she can't eat the pepperoni."
"I'll bring you the manager," she said.
"We don't want to eat the manager, we want to eat a pizza!" I said. The assistant manager came over, and he was very very sorry to have this trouble. The cook had made a pepper-and-onion pizza originally, but that one had gotten stuck to the pan and they couldn't get the crust out.
"He's new here, huh?"
The very youthful waitress said, "Yes... I'm new here too."
I said, "We had surmised that, actually."
Anyway, the Pizza Hut people did their absolute best to make their error good; they immediately offered to give us a coupon for a free large pizza the next time we came in and they fell all over themselves trying to apologize.
Very Youthful Waitress was asking the manager what they should do with the now-superfluous pepperoni and onion one they now had, and as Mitch and I were really hungry we decided we'd rather just take that one for free; they put it in a box for us and repeated the refrain "We're really very sorry!" a couple times. I just said the word "Braniff", and for some reason one manager in particular got quite frantic, plaintively crying, "Please! Please do come back! Please please!"
Mitch and I trotted off to lecture, slurping up cheese and sauce while walking in the rain, while Dan and Elisabeth stalked off to find other nourishment.