Through the Eyes of a Delivery Goddess |
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If you remember in the last installment, I mentioned I'd never flipped a pie. Well - ONCE .. and only once, I did drop a pizza. I am not a cook - if I apply to work somewhere that requires cooking, I quit. However, I was always good at getting pizzas and other food out of the oven, getting it boxed up, matching it to the proper receipt and bagging it for the next driver to take. I was the only veteran pizza person at the new Fox's down the road. We had these stupid rules to follow, one of them being to use these freaky looking tonges to pull cookie sheets out of the oven. I could not seem to manhandle them - no matter what I did, they would twist in my hand or the pan would slip out. Others seemed to have no problem, but me - just could not make them work. You've probably all seen the big spatula/paddle looking gizmo with which they pull pizzas out of the oven. Our first day in operation, the Big Cheeses from Fox's Corporate showed up to over see the operation. At one point, a hoagie on a cookie sheet came out of the oven, I grabbed the spatula (it has a proper name, but I haven't a CLUE what that might be), and scooped out the cookie sheet. One of the administrators leaned over my shoulder and quietly said, "You need to use the tonges, you'll drop the pan using the gizmo." Smugly, I turned around and said, "I've never dropped food coming out of the oven - never." He reminded me that I was setting a bad example, and I asked in return how much of an example would dropping the food with those rediculous tonges be? He rolled his eyes and walked away. Now, before I continue, you need to know that pizzas are cooked on screens to allow the warm air to cook the crust evenly - including on the bottom. When screens are new, or too clean, the dough sticks. A trick I learned at Pizza Outlet was to scoop the pizza out, screen and all, toss it onto the stainless table and push it against the wall. Turn the spatual gizmo over and scrape the pizza off with the backside of the gizmo. It usually worked - we lost less pizzas that way. It is not good practice to serve a pizza with the dough from the middle left behind on the screen, and just cheese holding the whole thing together. Trust me, it works that way. So, since everyone else was a rookie, and we had brand new screens, the dough was sticking, and on one particular small pizza, it was being really stubborn. I grabbed the gizmo from the young fellow who was trying to remove the pizza from the oven and tossed the pizza over onto the stainless table. I harshly scraped along the top of the screen to release the pizza and it decently popped straight up into the air, did a 180-degree flip and landed perfectly, squarely, cheese-side down onto the floor next to the table. I grabbed a box and quickly scooped it up into the box, tossed it into the trash, grabbed the receipt and walked over to the cooks and asked them to remake this order - I dropped it on the floor. When I turned from the cook the manager to whom I'd been bragging just thirty minutes prior was standing RIGHT behind me. I shrugged my shoulders and said, "There's always a first, isn't there"? He rolled his eyes and grabbed the dough from the kid making the replacement - I guess he thought he could do it faster. There you have it - the only time I EVER dropped a pizza ... and of course, it would have been only minutes after I just finished bragging about my handling skills. Bragging will turn to bite you in the backside if you're not careful! |