FIGHT THE MAN, FEED THE HOMELESS

Although my city is pretty much a haven for rich brats, we have our fair share of homeless people. They can generally be found, when they aren't selling the Big Issue, in one of three places:

• Outside the Co-Op, trying to trick freshers into giving them cigarettes
• In the graveyard, drinking cheap port and sleeping against gravestones (incidentally I think that's a great place to sleep, and if I was dead I would be totally down with a homeless guy sleeping on my gravestone, although I would prefer if it was a hot homeless lady)
  
• In the alley I mentioned in the previous post. The alley I walk through about 5 or 6 times an hour.

Actually, put like that, it looks like it bothers me that I have to walk past tramps. It doesn't. Sure, sometimes some of them are sometimes a bit in your face with their requests for change, fags, or pizza, all of them being requests I have to respectfully decline, seeing as the change on me actually belongs to my place of employment, the pizza on me actually belongs to my place of employment, and there are no fags on me (if there were, they would probably belong to my place of employment). But on the whole they just kind of stand around in the alley, being homeless, the usual. Sometimes they even give me a conspiratorial nod, a kind of "we're in this together" kind of thing.

Yeah, except I have a house.

Anyway, around closing time one of a number of homeless guys or gals will show up at the pizza place to see if there's any freebies going. There usually are: prank phone calls, drunk guys who ring for pizza then pass out before it arrives (another story for another time), and dickwads who don't have enough cash to pay but somehow think they can barter with me all result in unbought pizzas which sit on top of the oven, keeping warm, until closing time. When that magical hour of closing time finally arrives, those pizzas are available to whoever wants them. As we all get our own free food, which we get to order ourselves, we generally aren't overly fussed about eating other people's leftovers.

The homeless population, as you might expect, isn't so picky. Thing is, they can only show up and take advantage of delicious, stagnant pizza when one particular manager is working. We'll call her Becky, because her name is Becky. Becky is lovely, really nice to all of us studenty staff members even when we're just hiding at the back and doing stupid shit like seeing how much cardboard it takes to clog up the fan. She has the patience of a saint and the management skills of a really fucking good manager. She is equally lovely to the customers and to the bums who show up at closing time. Hell, she remembers all their names and has a brief conversation with each and every one of them. She's an impressive lady.

The other night managers are basically indifferent: I don't think they actively oppose feeding the homeless, but they don't really want dirty people in the customer section, and I think the tramps pick up those vibes and stay away on those nights. Becky's manager numero uno, though, so 5 nights out of 7 they get to dine for free on shit other people didn't want.

Thing is, the guy who actually owns the place (it's a franchise) is, to be frank, a cunt. He shows up once or twice a week, I think the days he isn't here he's off at one of his other pizza places being a cunt over there. Good riddance to him. The way he speaks to some of the staff members, and even to the managers who run the place better than he ever could, makes my blood boil sometimes. I think I'm a little too low down on the ladder to attract much of his attention, but the day he speaks to me like he speaks to some of my colleagues is the day he gets a black eye and I move across the road and start working for Domino's. Even if they do have a shitty uniform.

In keeping with his general theme of being a massive prick who needs a good kicking, the owner takes personal offence that Becky feeds his pizza to those disgusting tramps in the alley on the other side of the street. I mean, come on, that's his fucking pizza, and he should get to keep it if no one else wants it.

Never mind the fact that all he does with it is throw it in the fucking bin.

I'm serious. On the days he's in the shop, he flat out refuses to let Becky (or any of us) give away the unsold pizzas to the tramps. Instead, we have to throw them in the bin. Sure, I guess the homeless lads and ladies could root through our trash and pick bits of what-the-fuck-ever off the pizzas and eat them then, but why on earth should they have to? Human decency is a phrase that, I believe, would cause the owner to vomit in rage if he actually understood what it meant.

So the other day, I walk into work at 6 and I'm feeling pretty good. I just burned a new CD for my car stereo, full of highly offensive gangster rap, and I'm looking forward to driving around a bunch of genteel estates and offending whole neighbourhoods. It's a good job, this.

Oh shit. The owner's in. My mood drops from upbeat to stormy. I grumble a wordless greeting at Becky and slouch over to the computer to sign in, trying and failing to blot out the sound of the owner having a go at the pizza maker for NOT WORKING FAST ENOUGH even though, according to the computer, there is a grand total of one order waiting at the moment. Yeah, good point, wouldn't want to hold up all those invisible customers, would we?

Fucking dickhead.

Incidentally, I refer to the owner as the owner because I can't remember his name. I think it's some kind of strange animal instinct: I remember asking various people his name at various points, but I forget it almost immediately afterwards. As he never speaks to me, the lowly driver, I don't really have a need to remember it, and I think my brain has decided that if it blocks out his name we can all just pretend he doesn't exist.

I'm down with that.

A few hours later, my mood's a bit better. The owner's still around, but some of the best of my fellow delivery guys have shown up and together we are doing a good job of hating/ignoring him. It's a slow evening; in two hours I think I'd done a total of three drops, there just weren't any pizzas to deliver. As usual, the owner seemed to think this was the receptionist's fault for some reason: the fact that he is too stingy and retarded to pay for advertising (again; I'm serious) might have more to do with it, but whatever.

Two homeless guys walk past the door. I recognise them, but I don't know their names. Becky does, though, and she sticks her head out the door and shouts hi to them. They turn around, give her a wave and say hi back, and then amble over for a little chat. From what I overheard of the conversation (I could make an excuse about how tramps SPEAK REALLY LOUD, but that might insult your intelligence; I was bored and therefore eavesdropping), neither of the guys even asked if there was any pizza going, but Becky decided - despite the fact that possibly the dumbest restaurant owner in the country was still hanging around, stinking up the joint - they needed something to eat anyway.

She managed to pick the leftover pizzas up and made it halfway back to the door before he spotted her. The tramps were vigorously shooed (you know, as if they were animals), and Becky was rigorously told off. She didn't argue back, or even bother looking at him. She just got on with whatever it was she'd been doing before she spotted her friends and let him wear himself out.

This may seem like I'm making a caricature of the guy, by the way: I swear I'm not.

He's a total fucking douche.

At this point I was pretty tempted to forgo the promise I'd made to myself - that I'd only call the owner every name under the sun and possibly physically assault him if he ever started in on me - and just start shouting at him there and then. He's such a despicable person, and the fact that he's terrible at what he does makes it so much worse, somehow. It's like, if he was a really efficient owner and ran a great chain of restaurants you could forgive him his dickishness, much like Gordon Ramsey, for example. But what if Gordon Ramsey was a shit chef? Would his foulmouthed attitude be quite so popular then?

Obviously not.

I restrain myself, however - for as well as a pizza boy I am also a Zen monk - and it is then that THE PLAN bursts into my head. Like all great PLANS it is quite simple. I simply wait until the owner heads to the back of the restaurant to berate the dishwasher for NOT WASHING THE POTS AND PANS FAST ENOUGH (never mind the fact that she's actually working really fast, just shout at her anyway, it'll make you feel better), then I grab one of the pizza bags, stuff it completely full of leftovers, grab a used order ticket to make it look vaguely like I'm going out on an actual drop, and head out the door.

As the sound of the owner's disciplining gets quieter and I head across the street towards the alley I feel free: and more than that, I feel like a pretty fucking decent guy. I'm Gandhi, liberating the underclass. I'm Mother Theresa, showing mercy to all. I'm motherfucking Jesus Christ, feeding the five thousand.

Please ignore the fact that the only reason I'm doing it is to spite that despicable shit in the restaurant.

Anyway, the dudes in the alley were pretty fucking chuffed with a whole bunch of free pizza (plus some breaded mushrooms, jalapeno doughballs, and half a bag of nachos), and now I get more conspiratorial nods than ever. I still get hassled for change and fags, though. But it's like the old proverb: you can give a homeless man a pizza, but he still needs cash.

Wow, this has been a long post. Cheers if you actually made it to the end. If you got bored and just scrolled down, fuck you, but here's some bullet points anyway because I'm such a nice guy:

1. The owner of the place I work is a cunt.
2. I am really, really nice to tramps.