I actually got to enjoy my 15 minutes of fame, showing how indispensable I was when I quit my part time job delivering pizzas. I was really getting fed up with the place. Not the immediate manager so much, but the district manager and those above him, who didn't have a clue. Well, one Saturday night we were already understaffed, and I was already in a bad mood, getting madder by the minute. I finally decided to myself that I would quit after the next customer that pissed me off. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long. I went to the far extreme of our delivery area to deliver a pizza. Young kid comes to the door, giving me a $20 and wanting the exact change back. This is actually a common ploy by people too cheap to tip...send the kid to the door to do your dirty work for you. Sure, sometimes it's an honest mistake, but more often it's done on purpose.
Anyway, I went back to the store; this was about 9:00 at night, and told them I was quitting, right then and right there. They begged and begged, and the manager on duty tried to get ahold of the store manager, but to no avail. They had to close down the store, right then and there. That gave me a cruelly satisfying feeling.
The store manager called the next day and filled up my answering machine, and I decided to call him a few days later. That store never was the same after I left. I'd like to get all arrogant and say it was because they lost me, but it's much deeper than that. Management had been going downhill for awhile. They had too high of a turnover in store managers, with the good ones often getting taken advantage of, over-worked, and burnt-out, while the bad ones would just help sabotage the store. And that trickled down to the employees. The good ones would get fed up and quit because it was just easier to do that than implement changes. That left the more lazy, shiftless ones. Ultimately performance went down as the good drivers left. The drivers also helped make the pizzas, box them up, and occasionally take orders, and the closing driver would help clean up the store at night, so we did more than just drive. And the inside help was mainly just high-school kids. Anyway, the pizzas started taking longer to come out, get delivered, there were more messed up orders, etc, and it ultimately took its toll. In the end, that store ended up doing so bad that Corporate dumped it, and it's now a franchise. And I hear it's still a shell of its former glory.
