Take The Dollar Leave The Pizza!

During my high school years I worked at a pizza chain, I will just call it Pizza Stop (PS) to keep things anonymous.

When a customer calls PS to complain about their pizza they are given three options:

1. Remake the pizza and send it back out

2. A credit in the system so their next pizza will be free

3. A full refund of their money

I am sure you already know most everyone chooses option 2. Why you ask? Well because 9 times out of 10 you’re hungry as hell and the pizza is still edible, you’re not going to wait another hour for a fresh correct pizza and let’s just be honest, your kids or your friends have already ate half of it. The refund is not an option because that would require you to drive down to the store and who wants to leave their house? Isn’t that why you ordered a pizza in the first place?

Credits are the most popular option. On a busy Friday night you can get a lot of people calling back in for credits and each time you need a manager to come over and type in the credit. It only takes about 12 times in one night of interrupting a busy manager for them to just show you how to enter a credit. This was, by far, not a good thing to show a young high school kid with questionable ethics.

The abuse begins!

Carry out orders is where it all started, see at PS everything is linked to the phone number, so to get a free pizza on my day off all I had to do was enter a credit under a friends phone number, call PS and order my pizza, drive down and pick it up. The only issue was I worked there and I couldn’t just walk in and grab a free pizza. This is where my friend Sam (fake name) came in, Sam had just as shady ethics as I did so it only took about 5 seconds to convince him to walk in and grab the pizza.

The plan worked perfectly! We kept getting free pizzas about three times a week, I would use different phone numbers so nobody would get suspicious until one of the managers started to realize that whenever Sam walked in the door his pizza was free, this is how the last convo went:

Manager: Can I help you?

Sam: Yeah I had a pizza under Johnson

Manager: Ok, let me look here, oh yeah, Large 3 topping?

Sam: Yep

Manager: Ok, [walking over to the computer] looks like that is going to be....oh….wait it’s free…looks like you had a credit?

Sam: Yep

Manger: Hey wait a minute, how come every time you come in here your pizza is free?

Sam: Well you guys keep screwing it up. (Sam was, and still is, a total smart ass)

Manager: I don’t think so; you’re not getting any more free pizza, now get out of here.

That little incident put an end to our carryout free pizzas, but we were smart kids so we just needed to refine our strategy.

We had lots of friends that didn’t mind getting free pizza, so I would enter a credit under a friend’s phone number. Then we would drive over to their house after school, smoke weed, and order a pizza. We had it down to a science, the most you could give a credit for was $20.00 and if you only ordered $12.00 worth of pizza the other $8.00 was just wasted. To avoid wasting money, I spent a few minutes calculating the perfect order, large 3 topping, breadsticks, and wings was exactly $20.35 it was better to go over than under, after paying the driver a tip and the .35 cents we would get our pizza for $2.35. Just so you know how poor we were in high school we would fight over whose turn it was to pay the $2.35.

Things quickly started getting out of control; I actually took the student directory into PS and entered credits under every phone number of the kids I knew. When asked, I told the manager I was looking for people to pick up my shift.

More often than not, after school we would sit in my white Chevy and look through the student directory trying to find one of our friends that we hadn’t used their credit yet. Looking back I think it went something like this:

Bailey?

No we went to his house like two weeks ago

Bond?

No

Davidson?

No

Goodsen?

Nope

Higley?

Do you really wanna hang out with Higley?

Yeah, good point,

Owen?

Yeah! Owen, then we would drive straight to their house unannounced, “Dude, Owen, you got a credit man!” We said that line usually after we were already half way into their house and on the phone with PS.

I am still surprised that the delivery drivers didn’t put two and two together and realize each time they had a free pizza delivery there was my white Chevy in the driveway.

The Last Free Pizza

One day, we (Sam, Tom, and Me) were at Sam’s house and had just finished smoking weed and somebody had a great idea to order a pizza. I told Sam, “Dude I just put a credit on your phone number last night” We jumped to the phone and ordered a large 3 topping, breadsticks and wings, total was .35. We hung up the phone and were happy as hell; we smoked another bowl and waited for our pizza to show up. Then Sam started thinking and said, “Who is going to answer the door?” Our jaws dropped with despair because Sam could not answer the door because everyone knew him at PS and he was banned from free pizza for life. Tom and I both worked there so we couldn’t answer the door. So there we were, totally stoned, pizza on the way and no way to receive it.

After about 10 minutes, Sam thought up a plan, he gets a dollar (that is all the $ we had) and places it under a small rock right outside the front door. Then he walked up stairs and opened the window, and then he told me to disguise my voice and when the pizza guy shows up tell him, out the window, that you just got out of the shower and to leave the pizza. We all high five each other at our new full proof plan and smoked another bowl, of course.

About five minutes later the doorbell rang, I looked at Tom with a stage frightened expression on my face, we both started laughing our guts out, then Sam started laughing as well and none of us could stop laughing long enough to say anything out the window. We had to be quiet because the window was open and we didn’t want him to hear us laughing, it was that painful, uncontrollable laughter, and trying to be quiet at the same time, it was complete torture. The doorbell rang again and I started to panic because I knew if I did not get myself together we would not get our pizza. It seemed like 4 hours went by with us just rolling on the floor laughing in convulsions before Sam gained enough composure to yell in a dirty, raspy, voice, “TAKE THE DOLLAR LEAVE THE PIZZA!” After hearing that we went right back to laughing and rolling on the floor uncontrollably. We heard the driver pull out the pizza and set it on the ground; he took the dollar and started walking back toward his car, (right past my white Chevy) then Sam gets up to the window to see if he was gone and yells, “KEEP THE CHANGE!” The driver flipped him off and gets back into his car.

I told you, Sam is, and always will be, a total smart ass.

EDIT: I decided this post would make more sense if I included some audio of how it actually sounded when Sam yelled out to the delivery driver, enjoy.

Whenever my friends and I talk about this story we always wonder what the driver was thinking, I mean how often does a driver drop off a pizza and a voice from the window yells, in a deep voice, “Take the dollar leave the pizza!” Like why can’t you just open the door? And who puts a little pebble on top of a dollar in front of their door? To this day whenever I see Tom or Sam and one of us says, “Take the dollar leave the pizza!” we start laughing just as hard as we did on that day over 10 years ago.

Tyse