FAG TO GO

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME

2008-11-03T22:04:00.002Z

Too long, in fact. But now, freshly installed in my new house and having quit one job (which shall remain nameless) after an unhappy month, I'm happy to report that I'm back doing what God intended me to do: ~~killing hookers~~ delivering pizzas.

That's right, motherfuckers. I'm back. Tonight was my first night on my third pizza delivery job in a year. And if you're new to reading this - as I'm doubtless picking up new fans by the day with my regular updates and seductive prose - I'd like to point out that I didn't get fired from the previous two. Circumstances, and all that shit.

Holy shit I just looked at my reflection in the window and I seriously need a haircut. Oh, and sharamik, yes I'm doing a postgraduate now, in Religious Conflict no less; my experience of Arabs getting pissed off with the ham on their meat feast pizzas has led me down this strange alley.

But back on topic: I now work for another pizza chain, and although the uniform is pretty fucking hot, there's no free pizza on the table. Heavily discounted, sure, but fuck that shit. Am I right? I'm right. Fuck that shit. I'm going to have to work something out. I'm not in this business for the girls or drugs. I'm in this shit for the thin crust, stuffed base, olives, pineapple and jalapenos with a barbacue (how the FUCK do you spell barbacue) sauce base.

And you'd better fucking believe it.

The people seem nice so far, I've got to say: no Ryans or Dominicos in the pack tonight, anyway (although Dominico wasn't exactly not nice, just Italian; and incidentally, I've got at least one more story about each of them to tell, now that my passion for this lifestyle has been rejuvenated (rejuvinated? no, rejuvenated), so you'd best be watching out for that).

And I only did a few drops tonight - after spending TWO HOURS accompanying another driver, whose name currently escapes me, on his drops, to "learn the ropes" - but one of them's worth a mention, although perhaps not up to the standards of Y-Fronts. I'm glossing it - this in no way touches the standards of Y-Fronts, but that's the shitty thing about this blog, my pizza career, and my life in general: it peaked all too early with a nearly-naked men beating the shit out of a pile of speakers on an Exeter backstreet.

But, nevertheless, it scared the balls out of me (literally OUT of me) at the time, so it's worth a mention, I'd say.

So I'm doing this delivery, like my third in the area, but it's no big deal, I know the main roads well enough from visiting my girlfriend in the city over the years so I'm handling it okay so far, and I turn off the main road onto the street I'm aiming for, expecting, you know, a residential street. And I guess technically it is a residential street, only you can't see the fucking residences from the road. You can see the gigantic wrought iron gates, sure, and you can see driveways stretching into the infinite void of the night (that's poetry right there, motherfuckers), but you can't see no residences.

Still, there's house numbers on the gates, so that suffices. I drive along for what seems like, and is, a minute, until I reach the right gate. 608. And what do you get if you add those numbers together and take away 1?

That's right.

13.

Unperturbed by this sudden turn for the sinister, I press on the intercom.

Nothing.

I wait a minute.

Still nothing.

I press again.

"Yeeeeesss?"

The way I wrote it makes it look like a snake talking, but that's inaccurate: the written word cannot do justice to how gay and also Latino the voice sounds. Seriously. It's a combination I personally haven't heard before, and it's one that would light the fires of righteous anger in many a Confederate trucker's rotund belly.

But we're not in the American South. We're in Nottingham. And we're delivering some fucking pizza.

I tell him my business.

"Okay!" he exclaims (squeals), and the gargantuan gate (alliteration, too; this is a literary banquet today) creaks open. Ominous, perhaps, but undeniably impressive. I drive up the driveway, for such is the very purpose of a driveway, to the front door of the house.

Mansion. Whatever.

Standing at the door, leaning casually against it, is what I can only assume is my man. Not my man in, you know, the civil partnership sense. More the guy I'm delivering pizza to.

Did I mention he's dressed almost exactly like Tony Montana?

I say almost because he doesn't have a gigantic gun. Or maybe he does, but... whatever. I'm not going there.

As I walk up to him, pizza in my nubile young hand, I notice another figure standing behind Tony Montana. He isn't dressed like Tony Montana, but he is dressed like the kind of Columbian drug lord you'd expect to see in a GTA clone (or GTA itself, come to that: despite it's new gritty real world atmosphere it clings to stereotypes as desperately as a blind dairy farmer clings to his cow's udders as the raft the two of them are piloting across dangerous waters is capsized by vicious sharks).

Result of GIS for "Columbian drug lord". He wasn't dressed like this. Whatever.

As I take the pizza up to Tony Montana, he gestures to the drug lord behind him. Do I... do I take the pizza to him? I guess so, because Tony isn't making any move to take it off me. As I step forward to lean past him and give the pizza to Columbia, Tony Montana takes a few steps forward so he's now standing behind me.

Now, I'm not a rampant homophobe who equates "gay" with "rapist", but I'll be honest with you: at that point, I was putting two and two together and the answer was looking like a bumming. I pretty much chuck the pizza in the drug lord's face and whirl around to face my phallic assailant, my mind desperately running over which of the many kung-fu techniques I don't know I should use to get out of this situation.

Tony's lighting a cigarette and checking out a rose bush at the edge of his expansive garden. And that's not an elaborate metaphor: he looks miles away. Must be all the coke.

I take payment from the Columbian, who looks bewildered but not particularly put out by my pizza thrusting, and turn to leave. Raping or no raping, the whole situation was weirding me out.

"Hey!"

I turn around, expecting the last thing I see before losing my innocence to be the leering face of camp Tony Montana.

I do see his face, but it's not leering. It's a little bemused, and a little amused. He's holding my baseball cap out to me.

"Your hat?" he asks.

"Yeah," I reply, taking it back and placing it upon my hairy head with the infinite poise of a Zen mystic. "My hat."

I'm back, baby. And I'm creating socially awkward situations like never before.

ITALIAN STALLION

2008-09-17T11:17:00.002+01:00

Firstly, yet another apology about the sparse updates these days. I have moved house again (the first relocation was from where I went to university to my parents' house, this relocation is from my parents' place to the new place where I am going to a new university) and have been dealing with all the council tax dodging and job hunting that comes with such an endeavour. Now that most of that is out of the way - although I'm still not registered at the uni and don't have a regular rota for work yet - this seems a good time to tell the tale of Dominico and the irate customer.

Thing is, the irate customer was nothing to do with Dominico. Only he decided to make it to do with him, for reasons perhaps only knowable in his mysterious, ancient mind.

Anyway I'm working the phones because - at this point in the evening - it's a slow night and there's nothing to deliver. Now, when someone rings up, if it's a number that's placed a delivery order with us before, the customer's address comes up on the screen, we confirm that's the address, and get on with the order. Easy. If one telephone number has ordered to multiple addresses in the past - if, say, it's a mobile phone and the dude has ordered pizza at his, his mum's, and his girlfriend's house - all the addresses will be displayed, we ask which one it is, click on it, and get on with the order. Still easy. Even if you click on the wrong address, it's displayed in the corner of the screen the whole time you're entering the order, so you can easily go back and change it.

Thing is, I was barely paying attention when the dude ordered - in fact, I was reading a Batman comic - and so by the time I clicked on the wrong address I'd already forgotten what he'd said the right address was. So there wasn't much hope of me noticing my mistake. And so, about fifteen minutes later, Dominico took a pizza to the wrong side of town.

Now, Dominico's not really the quickest or most efficient driver, and it's generally accepted that he takes about 50% as long to do anything as anyone else. Because he's old, and old people are a drain on society. (Kidding! But not really) In the time it took him to drive out to the wrong address, find no one there, ring the customer's phone number - which, get this, was now turned off! - and drive back, the customer had turned up at the shop demanding to know where his pizza was.

I ask him where he ordered it for.

He gives me his address.

I check the computer.

We don't have any orders for that address, I tell him.

He fucking placed a fucking order forty fucking minutes ago, he informs me.

I ask him what he ordered.

A pepperoni feast, large fries, coleslaw, and a big bottle of coke, for fuck's sake, he tells me.

I check the computer.

We have a driver out with the order, only he's gone to a different address, I tell him.

Why the fuck is that, he asks.

Must have been a mistake with the computer, I inform him, my face a beacon of innocence.

He asks where the fucking driver is now.

Should be back any minute, I answer, and didn't he ring your number, I ask?

He tells me his phone's off.

I tell him he's supposed to give us a working phone number.

It does work, he says. It's just off.

I go to point out that that's fucking retarded.

He looks like he's going to punch me.

I keep my big mouth shut.

Just then, Dominico gets back, carrying a full bag and looking a little more irate than usual.

"No one there!" he exclaims, frustrated, and sets the bag down on the counter.

"This the guy?" the customer asks. He's a pretty big guy, and, by the smell of him, more than a little drunk. This combination of facts led to me not pushing my luck with him earlier, but if Dominico notices any of it he doesn't give a shit.

"The guy? The guy? What guy?" he asks, throwing his hands up as if astounded. "I am a guy!" he proclaims, as if the fact were being disputed.

"That my order?" the big man asks Dominico. Dominico's pretty short, and stooped over in that inimitable old man fashion, and I reckon the customer has about two feet and eighty pounds on him, but for some reason that only seems to fire the elderly Italian up more.

"If it's your order," he counters, jabbing one gnarled finger in the air, "why weren't you at your house?"

"Because I don't live there!" the drunk customer shouts, leaning down a little bit as if Dominico wouldn't be able to hear his beer-flecked proclamation from higher up.

"What do you want me to do?" Dominico asks, inexplicably angry that a customer is dissatisfied with admittedly shitty service."The ticket says there, I go there. What do you want me to do?"

"Well, who put the wrong address in?"

It's at this point that I start idling backwards, heading towards the prep kitchen before Dominico turns to say yeah, Goat, who did put the wrong address in? Up until that point the furious customer had been adequately distracted by Dominico and his old man's rage, but the tables were very much starting to rotate...

"Who cares?" Dominico asks, gesticulating wildly again. "Here's your food now, so you can go eat it! Go eat your food!"

He yanks the bag open and drags the order out. The pizza is still probably hot due to the heated bag, but I doubt it'll be particularly fresh tasting, and the paper bag the fries were in is completely translucent with absorbed grease. Not the kind of grub you see on Masterchef. Not, in short, what the big man wanted to see.

"I'm not eating that!" he shouts, momentarily thrown off balance by the very suggestion.

"Well then," Dominico says, "I guess that's done. We're done. No food, no money, everyone done." He dusts his hands as if satisfied that some ancient mystery has been solved, and goes to walk out the back.

"I paid by card!" the drunk guy says, and it sounds like his anger is starting to wear off into something I can identify with a lot more readily when it comes to Dominico: frustrated desperation. "I paid by card. Just give me a fresh order and leave it at that."

"Give a fresh order? Give a fresh order, he wants!" Dominico says, eyes frantic for a moment, pointing at me and the man alternately as if conducting an orchestra of appalling customer service. "I ring you, I ring you on your phone, and nothing! You keep your phone on like you're meant to and you could have had this-" on this he jabs furiously at the pizza box on the counter, "twenty minutes ago!"

The man opens his mouth to protest, then abruptly shuts it, and turns to me. "Can you," he begins, then pauses, and I struggle to keep my astonishment off my face. He is like a broken man; he doesn't know what to ask for, whether he deserves any of it, whether or not he should just crumple and take the lukewarm food scattered across the counter. Now, I hate bad customer service as much as anyone, and 95% of the time - unless I'm in a really bad mood - I'll be trying my hardest to make everything run as smoothly as possible. But the guy had been a bit of a dick, he'd had his phone off, he'd been aggressive - and let's please ignore for a moment the fact that it was my fault he had to come into the shop in the first place - and it was genuinely amazing to see how Dominico had, well, crushed his spirit. And all in the space of five minutes of insane finger jabbing.

"Can you just give me a refund?" he manages to get out on the second attempt, and I grasp the proffered straw with all my strength.

"I'll go ask my manager," I say, and go to move out the back of the restaurant.

Dominico opens his mouth to me, presumably to point out that our "manager" - as close as we have to one, anyway - isn't in tonight, but I just hold up a hand for silence and keep on walking. You've got to firm with Dominico or he'll walk right over you... as the hapless drunken chav of this sorry tale has adequately demonstrated.

So yeah, there was no manager out the back. But you know what there was? An order, ready to go, and an open back door. The last thing I heard before I stepped out into the refreshing night air was Dominico's voice, angrily enquiring as to what was wrong the stale pizza resting on the counter top.

I'm happy to say that my delivery went without a hitch.

THE WAITING GAME

2008-08-29T11:53:00.002+01:00

So, the country town where I ply my pizza trade is kind of in the midst of a period of regeneration, one that in fact has been going on in varying areas for the past half a decade or so. One part of this regeneration is the building of new housing estates, which seem to pop up here or there about once a year or so. Of course, being as we're just a country town, no one is in a massive hurry to map these areas, or update their map software, or their sat nav database, which means there are more than a few "ghost estates" that are a total pain in the cunt to find.

Usually Chris - who is basically self-appointed manager on the days Ali is not in - gives good directions, no matter how new or obscure the road in question, because he's been working in the same place for the past fifteen years and been living in the same village for more than double that. But one day - one tempetuous maelstrom of a day - Chris wasn't in work. Possibly because it was his day off. But fuck that. You hear me, Chris? Fuck that.

Fuck.

So I take the order over the phone and just put the address - let's say it's 11 Cambridge Avenue, although it probably isn't - into the computer without thinking about it. There's good for cause for my lack of attention, in that there are four drivers and so only a 1 in 4 chance that I'll have to deal with the consequences of any potential fuck-ups I might make in the course of taking an order (such as the time I basically got Dominico into a fight).

As it turns out, the wheel of fate didn't favour me, and so about a half hour later I look at the ticket, brow furrowed in a way that suggests intense concentration without actually marring my natural good looks, mentally running a finger through the encyclopedic corridors of my freakish brain and coming up empty.

"Where's Cambridge Avenue?" I ask Phil.

Phil looks at the receipt, and a frown of his own creases his ample brow. "Dunno," he says, and shrugs. "There's a note that says it's on Uley Road."

I look a little closer. Indeed there is. Only it doesn't just say on Uley Road; it says on or off Uley Road, which broadens things quite a bit. Uley Road is about four miles long, and at a barely-educated guess I'd say there are about twenty roads coming off it, all of which have their own forks and shoots. And that's an area of town I'm fairly familiar with, and I sure as fuck don't remember a Cambridge Avenue.

"Thanks. That's... that's helpful."

Phil tips me a salute, but he's not even listening. He's reading this page on the bbc sports website and he's an Arsenal fan, so in fairness he's got a good excuse for being a little distracted. I, on the other hand, am quite secure in supporting the most underachieving team in the country, so I grab the order and head out. No sense in wasting time: I'm a fucking man of fucking action and I've got a fucking pizza to fucking deliver.

Besides, I've got the customer's mobile number on the receipt, so if it all goes pear-shaped - which it wouldn't - I can just ring him up and get a spot of advice.

First up, when I get down to that end of town, I drive right out to the end of Uley Road and check out a newish estate which has a few obscure roads on it that don't always turn up on our maps. I give it a good going over twice, but no cigar. Not even a limp hand-rolled, come to that. I head back up Uley Road, going slow enough to cause three cars to honk loudly and overtake dangerously, and check every turning.

I say every turning, but I actually lost faith in the mission halfway through and parked up in a bus stop to dial the number on the receipt. I was pretty fucking confident I wasn't going to see Cambridge Avenue on any of the road signs I was passing, and besides, it'd be a lot quicker to just go ahead and phone the bloke anyway, right?

Right?

WRONG

Nothing fancy. Nothing world-shattering. Just straight to answerphone. Great. Fucking great. You ring up to order a pizza, you live on a new road in a town that seems to shit out new roads quicker than television shits out "celebrities", and then you turn your arse-buggering phone off. Come on, now. You're taking the piss, aren't you?

I ring the restaurant (I'd like to point out that I use the term restaurant loosely).

"Allo?" It's Phil.

"Hi, it's Matt. I can't find Cambridge Avenue."

"Hold on a sec."

I hold on a sec. A sec turns out to be about three minutes, but that's fine, because I'm having fun sitting in my car at a bus stop with a pizza that's not getting any warmer.

"I looked on the internet," Phil informs me when he comes back on the line.

"Right, and?"

"It's not there."

"Great!"

"Have you tried phoning the customer?"

"Have I tried...? Yes, I've tried phoning the bloody customer. Can you ring Chris or something?"

Phil sighs. It is a sigh partly of exasperation but also of melancholy. The news of the Fulham result is weighing heavily on his soul, I can tell, but this isn't the time to remonstrate or sympathise. This is a time of action... and anyway, I'd feel a hell of a lot sorrier if I didn't support Derby County.

"I'll see," he says flatly. "You might as well stay there."

"Great!"

About three, maybe four, minutes later my own mobile rings. It's the restaurant.

"You got Chris, then?" I ask by way of greeting.

"I got his answerphone." It's Phil, again. "I left him a message saying to ring you as soon as possible. He might just be on the loo or something-"

"Thanks for that image. Nice. That's nice."

"-so, give it another five minutes, then give up. Their loss."

"And great commitment to customer service. Alright, I'll see you soon."

To be honest I'd have been fine with just giving up there and then, because seriously, if you order a pizza, don't turn your fucking phone off afterwards. That's just retarded. PIZZA ORDERERS OF THE WORLD, LEAVE YOUR FUCKING PHONES ON. IF YOU DO NOT DO THIS VERY SIMPLE AND LOGICAL THING, THE CONSEQUENCES ARE ENTIRELY YOUR OWN FAULT.

But I'm a dependable (not to mention rugged) guy, so I wait it out for another five minutes. But only another five minutes, and then I start up the engine and head back to the restaurant.

I make it about two-thirds of the way when my mobile rings.

"You fucker," I say calmly to my rear view mirror, and pull over to the pavement.

"Chris!" I exclaim, my voice indicating a joy that was nowhere to be found in the confines of my Corsa.

"Alright, you stuck for somewhere?" Businesslike. Good man.

"Yeah, Cambridge Avenue."

"Cambridge Avenue?" There's a pause, and I begin to suspect that such a place didn't even bloody exist. "Oh yeah, I remember it. Yeah, that one's a bit of a bastard. No sign at all."

No sign at all. Brilliant! And the cunt turned his phone off. Brilliant.

"It's actually on Uley Road," Chris continues. "You know the bus stop?"

"The bus stop on Uley Road?" I ask, feeling hysterical laughter bubble up inside me.

"Yeah."

"Yes, Chris, I know the bus stop on Uley Road. In fact, I spent probably the last quarter of an hour parked in it."

"You're shitting me?"

"I assure you, Chris, I am not fucking shitting you."

"Hah! Those houses directly outside it? That's Cambridge Avenue."

"Brilliant. Thanks Chris."

"That's pretty funny, isn't it, you sat right outside for fifteen minutes?"

"Thanks Chris."

I put the phone down, turn around, and drive back to Cambridge Avenue. In my eyes, if you'd looked closely, you'd have seen a fire that Satan himself would have feared to touch. A fire that could only be extinguished by justice.

Or a tip roughly equal to 10% of the order's value.

I knock on the door of number eleven Cambridge Avenue, and a portly gentleman answers.

"What were you doing out there?" he asks.

This wasn't the question I'd been expecting. "What took you so long", yes, but not "What were you doing out there". The implications of that question from this man - this fat, fat man with the switched-off mobile phone - troubled my mind greatly.

"Out there?" I ask, a rictus grin affixed to my features.

"Yeah, you were sat out there for like ten minutes! We were watching you out of the window. That isn't the same pizza you had with you the whole time, is it?" His nose wrinkles in apparent disgust at the thought that I hadn't left and returned in order to cook him a fresh pizza.

"It is, actually," I say, quite calmly, the pleasant-but-not-that-pleasant smile clinging desperately to my lips. "And I was sat out there because I didn't know where Cambridge Avenue was, on account of it not having a road sign. I tried to ring you, but your mobile was turned off, and as you ordered from your mobile, that's the only number we have."

"My mobile isn't turned off!" the chubber protests, not willing to give up what he seems to have envisioned as some kind of upper ground.

"I'll try ringing it again, shall I?" I ask, still smiling, though at this point the expression is more reminiscent of a chimp baring its teeth before attacking.

I try ringing it again.

It goes straight to answerphone.

"You see?" I say, feeling my mask of sanity slip a little, and I thrust the phone in his direction. "That's your number, right? The one I just rang? The one that just went straight to answer machine?"

"...Yes," he admits, nose held high, dignity not about to be sullied by the simple fucking fact that the pizza boy was right. "But the pizza must be cold now, don't you give a discount?"

The way his piggy eyes light up at the prospect of cheap pizza threatens to send me completely over the edge but I hold in, digging my claws in and keeping as firm a grip as I can on my flailing psyche.

"We ask that all customers provide us with a working phone number in case of any unforeseen problems," I tell him flatly, starting to unload the lukewarm food now. "You failed to do that."

"My mobile phone works!" the lard mountain protests, but more weakly now. He sees that the evidence is on my side, and, perhaps more importantly, he senses a little bit of how close I am to inflicting serious blunt trauma with a box of chicken wings.

"It might well do, sir," I say, "but it's switched off, isn't it? And if you were watching me out of your window while I used my mobile phone, trying to find out where you lived, you could have rectified that problem by coming outside or even just turning your mobile on. So no, your order does not qualify for a discount."

"I shouldn't have to come out to you!" the Fat Man retorts, jowls flapping in the wind like sails in a tempest as his mind renewed its assault on my reasoned argument.

The smile leaves my face, but I manage to keep a handle on my more primal urges.

"Look," I say, placing the food in his outstretched hands - even in the midst of the argument, his arms had been out, waiting to receive the food he obviously so depserately needed - "you're quite welcome to take it up with the owner, or the manager. Both of them will be in tomorrow. I'll make a note of your order number, your complaint, and the fact that you had your mobile phone switched off. Okay?"

There's a pause which I imagine is more awkward for the big-bellied gent than me. It seems to finally have become clear to him that his plan to harass the delivery boy into giving him money off isn't going to work.

He shakes his head. Flesh flaps everywhere. "Forget it," he tells me, magnaminous in defeat.

Only I didn't forget it, and instead it became a cautionary tale, for those of us who want to order pizza but are too retarded to think more than five minutes into the future. Also a tale about how you shouldn't piss someone off who is only working in a temporary position and could be fired the next day without it having a significant impact on his life.

IT'S A ME, DOMINICO

2008-08-22T14:27:00.002+01:00

Get it? It's funny/racist because Dominico is Italian. He's also the craziest colleague at my new place of employment. Don't get any ideas, he is in no way a counterpart to Brian: for a start, he's actually likeable, in his own way, unless he happens to rub you the wrong way when you're just not feeling like being rubbed at all.

Okay, that was a bit homo.

Dominico is:

about 60, or something
an absolute maniac of a driver. I think he was born before speed limits, common courtesy, or respect for your own life and/or the life of others had been invented, though, so that's sort of an excuse
incredibly grumpy about 95% of the time, and an insane jester for the other 5% (it's hard to know which is worse)
full of shit
the laziest person I've ever worked alongside. Maybe when you get to a certain age you just stop giving a shit, but he's lax in taking the right stuff out, curt over the phone, and just plain ignores customers sometimes. The reason he's still employed - as far as I can tell - is that he and Ali (the owner) go waaaaaaaaaaaaay back, and it's kind of got past the stage where he could ever be fired. Fair play to him, I guess.

So, it's about 5:30 and me and Rosie (Rosie and I? Whatever) are just kind of slouching around at the front desk, when who should come in but everyone's favourite Italian.

"My friend," he says to me, "how are you doing today? Have you the money you owe me?"

"Nope," I say cheerily enough, "and I never will, so, you know, get used to that."

He shrugs, the one sane man in a world gone mad. "The kids today," he imparts to Rosie, "what can you do?"

(Note: I did not owe him penny one)

Rosie giggles and shrugs back at him, and Dominico peers at her a little closer. "Hmmm..." he says, shakes his head, and then looks again. "Have you put on weight?"

(Note: the last time Dominico had seen Rosie was less than 24 hours ago)

"What?" she snaps, giggly no more.

"Eh..." Dominico gesticulates a little, shrugs, then turns and walks out the back. On the way, he gives me a little wink, and I manage to avoid smiling or winking back. It's pretty funny, though. Had Rosie put on weight in less than a day? I cannot say.

Maybe she had.

But that was not important. What was important was Dominico's sharply delivered diss, and Rosie was smarting. For the next forty minutes or so, as the only person in the room with her, I was on the receiving end of a vaguely-aimed tirade which started out being targetted at Dominico, then at me (?), then at some ex-boyfriend, then at basically everything, as far as I could tell.

So I'm staring into the distance, cursing Dominico for setting Rosie off (Rosie is lovely normally, it's just The Kingdom of Grease and Shit will do things to certain people's temperments), and it hits me like a lightning bolt thrown by some kind of genius god (maybe a combination of Zeus and Einstein? Zeusstein? Eineus? this isn't going anywhere).

"Look," I say, pushing myself to my feet like a general rising to survey his troops. "If Dom pissed you off, you've just gotta piss him off."

"Piss him off?" Rosie looks doubtful and a little surprised, stopped as she'd been in mid-rant. I honestly have no idea what she was talking about at this point because I'd stopped paying attention like nearly a half hour before (as an aside, it is amazing how you can browse the internet on the electronic tills).

"Yeah, piss him off. Come on, it's Dominico, it's not exactly hard to get him going."

She grins. "Yeah." And we kind of bow our heads and whisper excitedly, in a way that makes it clear we are hatching an ominous and brilliant plot, but at the same time makes it impossible to discern our actual words.

What is the plot?

You just don't know.

About two hours later Dominico get backs from doing a drop, parking - as is his way - across two spaces and heading through the front door.

"Did you just go to 9 The Crescent?" Rosie asks him as he walks around the front desk.

"Eh..." He shrugs. Shrugging is kind of Dominico's thing. It's also because he's never paying attention to anything, so it's not an affectation kind of thing, he just genuinely doesn't know anything. Even where he went like a minute ago (this is perhaps part of the reason why you should never get in a car driven by Dominico).

"I'll check for you." She examines the computer screen. "Yeah, you did. And they just called. Guess what? You forgot the cokes."

"What?"

"You. Forgot. The. Cokes."

"No! Come on, no. No. No way."

"Come on, man," I chime in, offering him a what-can-you-do-the-world-sucks shrug as I do so. "It's not that far, right?"

"You take them then!" he retorts.

I laugh. "Yeah, not gonna happen. They need me here. I'm an important part of the operation."

"And I'm not?"

"You're like sixty years old!"

Dominico gives one of his trademark grunts and waves me away impatiently, before stomping over to the fridge and lugging out two of the big cokes. He storms out the front doors without so much as a farewell wave; as he does, Rosie flashes me a radiant grin and moves to the doorway.

A few moments later and Dominico's car comes roaring round out of the car park, and Rosie runs out to the roadside, gesturing wildly. I see Dominico clock her presence; I even see the moment of decision in his eyes as he wonders whether or not to ignore her. In the end, something must misfire in his brain, because he actually pays attention and stops the car.

"Did you take regular cokes?" Rosie asks.

"Yeah, coke, you said coke, I take coke!" Dominico is proper steaming now, all waving his hands round in the air like some kind of demented preacher-come-pizza-guy.

"You could have checked the receipt!" Rosie retorts hotly. "It's Diet Coke."

"Can you get them for me?"

"On the phone," she replies after a moments' pause, then runs back inside and starts talking into one of the receivers.

Once Dominico's got his cokes and buggered off, Rosie puts the phone down.

"I'm off now," she says, flashing another lovely grin.

"Okay, see- wait, what? You're fucking off?"

"Yeah, this is my early night," she says, as if that was fucking obvious. It wasn't. It wasn't fucking obvious.

"Right, great. So, uh, so just who d'you think's gonna take the fall for this one, huh?"

Now it's Rosie's turn to shrug. "Hey, it was your idea."

She's got me there. It was my idea. But it wasn't an idea I expected I'd have to deal with the repercussions of. Damn it, the best ideas are ones you never have to face the consequences of. But, as is my way, I was outmanouevred by a female co-worker.

Such is life.

Oh, in case you're crazy or something, there was no missed coke on the order: it's just Dominico never checks the receipts, so he never knows either way. And yeah, someone had to take the fall for that particular incident of playing-pranks-on-60-year-old-men, and yeah, this time it was me. Apparently "he's going to get me" and "he's going to really get me" so, you know, I'll keep on my toes.

He'll never get me.

Old dudes can't run, right?

(NB: This is the second part of today's double update. See below for the first part.)

MEET BRIAN, PART THREE

2008-08-22T12:01:00.002+01:00

aka THE POETRY BOOK

(a little later than the promised time, but come on, you were totally expecting that)

As I mentioned in my first expose on Brian (second expose here), Brian self publishes his own materials, these materials ranging from history books to novels to books of poetry. Because, of course, unlike your typical published writer who has a speciality, Brian excels at all things and thus publishes in all areas. Please ignore the fact that he pays for the privelige of being published rather than the other way round, and simply accept that Brian is all things to all men.

I also mentioned that he tries to sell these masterpieces of the modern craft of writing to his colleagues, presumably because there are only so many times you can try to sell shitty pamphlets to your mother before she threatens to evict you from your basement residence. Some of the guys and girls, those who suffer from the human emotions known as sympathy and guilt, will occasionally purchase one (recent works include a history of Bonnie and Clyde and, if you can fucking dig it, a story about a struggling writer), but as I am sure you are aware I am not cursed with these petty weaknesses. I eat sympathy and shit guilt, motherfuckers.

(what)

So one day I'm making some boxes - I fucking love my new job, where the box-making is left to whoever pussys out first, which is never me - and of course Brian singles me out. Brilliant! I was just thinking I wanted to talk to a self-obssessed loser!

"I published a new book today," he says, an expectant smile on his face. No hello, no how are you, just a strong implication that I should buy something from him.

I debate which route to follow. Should I just ignore him? That was working increasingly well, although there was always the niggling worry of the tubby prat going postal. Should I try and divert his attention to a different topic? Not going to happen. Should I divert his attention to someone else? I didn't really want to inflict Brian on poor Maciej again, and the only other person around was Becky, who'd quite happily send Brian straight back over to me.

Should I... should I buy a book off him?

Ha!

"Cool," I say, settling for being as noncommital as possible.

"It's retailing for £3," he says. Retailing. I fucking love it. Not 'I'm selling it for £3', which is of course what is happening, but 'retailing', as though it's a real fucking book that real fucking people would pay real fucking money for. Here's a pro tip: if you're selling a book for three fucking quid, odds are you aren't meant to be saying it's 'retailing'.

"That's quite a good deal," I observe, sagely, as if I'm a man who's bought many books at a wide range of prices, which is closer to the truth than you will ever know.

"Could I interest you in a copy?" He pushes on, like a retarded bulldozer.

"Maybe," I say, stalling, the gears in my brain running at triple speed trying to work out some way to avoid dropping 300 pennies on some foetid bullshit. I mean, yeah, it's only three pounds, right? That's so little money it doesn't even matter, right?

WRONG.

1. I'm working in a pizza place, so you can safely assume I'm skint, and £3 could buy 3 double vodka red bulls at the right club on the right night. So in the grand scheme of things, three quid = mad coin.

2. It's the fucking principle of the thing. And you know I'm a man of principle.

"Could I... could I sample it first?" I ask. YES! Genius. I'm so fucking smart. "Only," I continue, hastily remembering Brian's fondness for reciting his own work to people, "only I'd like to see how it looks on the page, you know?"

"Okay." Brian agrees warily, eyeing me in a way that makes me a little uncomfortable. "But what if you read it all in one sitting? Where does that leave me?"

Ha!

Hahaha!

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Yeah, I'm going to read the whole book. Sure.

"If I do that," I assure him, flashing my most winning of grins - the grin that has launched a thousand dicks ships - "I'll buy it for sure."

Brian smiles, satisfied, and leaves me the fuck alone. I make some boxes, which after a few minutes of conversation with Brian feels roughly equivalent to fucking Shyla Stylez on a bed of acid infused 50 quid notes.

Later that night, at ten o clock, Brian's heading home. The shirking bastard never stays 'til close, whereas I do pretty much all the time. I don't suffer from sympathy or guilt, but I do have a deer-in-the-headlights to tendency to freeze and go "uhhhh.... no, I'm free tonight" whenever my boss rings me up.

That's right, I'm banging my boss.

"Here's the book!" he announces cheerily, thrusting a crappy green booklet with what looks like a caricature of the crucifixion on the front of it.

I look a little closer.

Yep. That's a caricature alright.

A caricature of the crucifixion.

(As an aside, it totally figures that Brian would carry copies of his book with him everywhere he goes, even on the day of it being published).

By the time I've stopped staring at the drawing on the cover, Brian's gone, like some kind of vampire. An evil, evil vampire. A vampire that's been crossed with a Vogon.

"What the fuck is that?"

It's Hannah, one of the receptionists, and she's frowning quite intensely at the cover.

"I have no fucking idea."

Turns out it's a book of Christian poetry! Brian's not even a Christian, as he's told me more than once in his interminable lectures concerning life, the universe, and BULLSHIT, but he's written a book of Christian poetry, and apparently self-illustrated it with drawings that settle precariously on the border between disrespectful and insane. The "poems" ALWAYS followed a rhyme scheme that went roughly AAAABBBBCCCC, and there was no evidence of rhythm or meter whatsoever. Because of his insistence on continuous rhyming of the same word, he'd end up really stretching on the later lines of the poems.

Man, you have no idea. Unfortunately I can't actually remember any actual excerpts (I am going to get on the phone to Hannah later today and try and see if I can get a copy of it because now I actually kind of wish I had spent the equivalent of three double vodka red bulls on this masterpiece of shit), because I read it for half an hour and work and promptly forgot it existed as soon as I went out on my next drop.

Fast forward a week later and Brian's in work again.

"So, uh, can I have my book back now? It's been longer than we said."

"Oh... oh, yeah, shit, man, I totally forgot! I left it at home. I'll bring it in for you tomorrow, dude. Sorry."

Shit. Where the fuck is it. It's somewhere in the restaurant, but I can't even look until Brian's gone. At ten o clock, same as every night he works, Brian fucks off, and I enlist Hannah to search for the 'book'.

We don't find it. Anywhere. It's not even a big place. What the fuck.

I could just pay £3 for it. As I said, I regret not buying a copy now. But not then. Never then. I'd be damned if I was going to support Brian's lifestyle of producing horrible 'works' and inflicting horrible 'conversations' on 'me'.

And so it continued for the next three or four weeks, my excuses becoming more pathetic and stretched as Brian became increasingly irate with me. Man, I don't even know why, he should have taken it as a compliment that someone was holding onto his book for that one. His fucking bedroom must have been full of them. Thing is, Brian becoming pissed at me had an absolutely magnificent upside: he stopped talking to me. He'd ask for his book, get all pissy when I fobbed him off, and that would be it. Some other poor bastard got the day's topic of discussion (I say discussion, but that implies there was one than one person doing the talking).

My evening surveys of the restaurant looking for the book of Christian poetry became laxer and laxer until, in the last week of the ordeal, they stopped altogether. Call me a dick if you want, but you've never had to work with Brian.

Actually don't call me a dick. Fuck you if you call me a dick. That's not on.

So, the joyous days of not talking to Brian were getting in full flow, until one early evening as I come into work what do I see but the leering, poorly drawn face of Our Lord and Saviour leching up at me from his cartoon cross.

It's the book.

It's back to fucking haunt me.

Which meant, unfortunately, that Brian was back to haunt me.

Turns out that the owner had come in the morning after that fateful night when I received the book, and had flicked through it while waiting for Becky to turn up (presumably so he could have a go at her for being too competent and pleasant, whatever, I don't know, dude's a knob). He found it so hilariously awful that he took it home to do readings from it for his family. Fair enough, man, I mean the guy's a total cunt, but I kind of admire any father who gives his children tragically shit Christian poetry for their bedtime reading. Rock on, man. Rock the fuck on.

And yeah, Brian started talking to me again, but I went out that Wednesday and you know what?

I drank a fucking shit ton of double vodka red bull.

DELAYED

2008-08-21T21:04:00.003+01:00

Just wanted to apologise that the promised bumper update has been put back a day. I could have gone back and edited the previous post to make it look like I promised it for FRIDAY, but that's not the kind of guy I am. I believe in pizza, and I believe in the truth.

And above everything, I believe in the Kingdom of Grease and Shit.

Look for update #1 (the story of Brian's book of poetry) around 1200 and update #2 (the story of the enraged Italian) around 1500 GMT. Go on. You know you want to.

And on Monday, service resumes as normal, with a compilation of countryside nutters.

Oh, AND! AND! Check this fucking shit out.

THE KINGDOM OF GREASE AND SHIT

2008-08-19T09:50:00.003+01:00

Hi there. I understand I haven't updated for a while. But don't worry, because that's cool. Everything is cool. We're all friends here.

Actually today is only a brief update, but it's to sort of herald THURSDAY, when I will be offering up a double update to appease those of you as ravenous for news about pizza delivering as the average man is ravenous for just eating pizza. THURSDAY will see the last of the tales of Brian for a time, and the introduction of the closest equivalent (i.e. craziest colleague) at my new place of employment. We will call him Dominico, because that is his name and he's definitely too old to know how the internet works.

Anyway, the other night I took a phone order (at the new place drivers have to operate the phones too, which sounded shit in principle but it beats the living cunts out of making boxes for two hours straight). The order was for:

2 cheese bacon burgers (fat off the bacon, cooked crispy)
16 cans of Grolsch

Yeah, we sell booze at this place too. It's great! It costs about 1.50 a can - what you'd expect to pay for a lower end pint in a fucking pub - but in the countryside, it's the only place you can get booze past 8pm unless you're willing to drive a 40 minute round trip, so we can afford to gouge a little.

Now, it's quite late in the shift, and although things are pretty quiet now they were fucking hectic as for the past three hours, and Milly - the usually lovely cook - isn't in the best of moods. The regular manager - the one who can actually plan things well and keep the workload, you know, managed - isn't in, so instead we've got the owner's cousin, who is a nice enough guy but not particularly competent as a manager. To give you an (admittedly unrelated to pizza place management) idea, he recently totalled his car by driving it into a bus.

Into a fucking bus.

Bus.

Anyway, so we've had a mental few hours and Milly is more than a little flustered. I shout the order for the burgers - cheese, bacon fat off extra crispy - and she flips a bitch.

"Like I'm cutting the fat off BURNING HOT BACON!" she exclaims, exclaimingly.

"You... you could cut it off before you cook it?" I suggest.

"You fucking do it then!"

She's got me there. It is a remarkably easy task, when you think about it, but I've got the days football results loaded up and I don't really feel like leaving them alone.

"I can't," I proclaim boldly. "I have to man the desk."

"Man the fucking desk," she mutters, as if none of the words that just escaped my mouth mean a thing to her. "Besides, what the hell is that about anyway? Cutting the fat off? You don't order from a pizza place if you want healthy fucking food!"

"Could be personal taste?" I postulate.

"Personal fucking taste. Bollocks. You come here, you better not expect anything remotely fucking healthy. This is the fucking Kingdom of Grease and Shit!"

(Note: I added the capitalisation to Kingdom of Grease and Shit myself because, come on, seriously. I suppose Milly might have intended it)

Just then, a man stands up from in front of the desk. He'd been sitting on one of the customer seats for the entirety of our conversation. I'd forgotten about him because he'd been there for the past half hour. He'd come in, bought four cans of Foster's, and apparently just sat down to drink them. In the fucking shop. Not really on, but whatever. The point was less about him bringing our noble outlet into disrepute, and more about him overhearing the blatant lack of shit-giving going on in the Kingdom of Grease and Shit.

Our resident drunk fixes Milly with a look that transfixes her at a range of about ten feet. He opens his mouth to speak... then closes it again.

He burps.

Then he opens his mouth, and this time the words come forth.

"That should be your slogan," he intones, gravely. "The Kingdom... of Grease and Shit."

Then he turns, and with the last can of Foster's in hand, he leaves.

Milly was a lot more careful about what she said for the rest of that night, but it didn't last long. In the Kingdom of Grease and Shit, nothing lasts long.

Man, what would our fucking logo look like?

SHORT TALES OF CHAOS, PART TWO

2008-07-28T10:24:00.002+01:00

or THIS RIOT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED

Brief bit of context: the night this happened was the night of a big football game in the city. The local team needed a win to secure their place in the playoffs and the visitors needed a win to secure an automatic promotion position, so it was a big night for both sides. Which of course meant it was a big night for the fans. Which meant shit was going to kick off at some point and it was just a question of when.

As is my style, I happened to time it perfectly on two occassions.

So I'm driving back from a drop - this is about an hour before the match even started - and I stop at a zebra crossing to let someone over. In the ten seconds this took the street went from being more or less empty to being swarmed by football shirt wearing mouth-breathers and riot police; seriously, it was fast. One moment, nothing, just me sitting in my car and wondering why the dashboard clock was being so fucking slow, then BOOM! RIOT.

The police are forcing goons out of a pub on the other side of the street, and they're doing so with remarkable efficiency, perhaps because said goons are concentrating more on fighting each other than the police. Fans from both sides just scrapping away, and the cops are kind of herding them as far away from the pub as they can. They seem pretty confused about the whole thing, perhaps because they're more used to people fighting back at them than just going with the flow in order to best continue their own private (well, quite public, really) struggles.

Such is the current of hooliganism that the road itself quickly fills with leering, jeering, bottle-throwing fans. What the fuck am I supposed to do now? I don't mind admitting that I'm a little bit unnerved by the whole thing. The migrating brawl doesn't even seem to clock my presence, but I can't drive in any direction without hitting someone, and I don't particularly fancy running someone down even if they do SUPPORT ANOTHER FOOTBALL TEAM OH MY GOD WHAT A CUNT AM I RIGHT.

But, unfortunately for me, the flowing riot seems to have come to a temporary halt. In the middle of the fucking road. And the fans seem to have momentarily forgotten their differences in order to unite against a common enemy: the motherfucking police. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and all that, although in this case there seems to be a kind of reverse love triangle of enemies that doesn't bode well for any potential reconciliation in the near future.

So I'm just there, in my Corsa, wondering what my manager is going to make of my excuse for being late back from the drop. Bottles are being thrown, riot batons are prodding ample beer bellies, and I'm just watching it all from the epicentre with the kind of detached fascination I imagine a deer caught in a truck's headlights must feel.

But, eventually, my sense of pizza professionalism wins through and I realise this shit ain't gonna stop going down any time soon. Which fucking sucks, 'cause that means I've got to actually do something about my predicament, which is not my style at all I don't mind telling you.

I roll down my window.

"Er, excuse me?" I shout to the bloke standing nearest to the front of my car.

He turns, startled by the dulcet tones of my voice, momentarily abandoning his noble pursuit of hurling verbal abuse at police officers from behind the safety of about fifty other rioters.

"What?" he asks, a mixture of surprise and primal rage in his voice.

"Er... would you mind moving?" I ask. "You know, just for a second, you can move back after, I'm just running a bit late." I kind of gesture at my car, and then the road, and then him, and then my car again, as I talk, hoping my inept mime will indicate to him what my words are clearly failing to do.

Amazingly, recognition registers after a few moments, and the dude's eyes widen in shock and awe.

"Oh, fucking hell!" he announces, and promptly steps forward, to the edge of the road and deeper into the throng. "Didn't even fucking clock where I was! Sorry mate!" He reaches out with two burly arms and promptly drags two skinnier unfortunates out of my path. "Oi, you mugs, we're in the fucking road!" he tells them, and I see the same astounded realisation on the faces of his thuggish compatriots.

"Cheers, mate!" I say with a casual wave as I drive out of the riot I'd been momentarily embroiled in.

"No worries!" my new friend shouts back cheerily.

As I drive off I look in the rearview and see him pushing deeper still into the riot, tossing aside friend and foe alike as if they were no more than ears of corn in the field of life. That may sound a touch poetic to you, but if it does that is only because you fail to comprehend the beauty of a football riot.

Anyway I get back and my manager looks sceptical, but I remind her of the football game that's on today and she kind of shrugs and just goes along with it (not that she could really do anything else, and not that she really gave a fuck in the first place). I head out on my next drop, and as I do I see a familiar shape on the horizon. I'm driving in the opposite direction to it, but I see what it is and I see where it's headed.

It's the riot. The police have managed to get it moving again - why I don't know, maybe they decided it was time for some other people to be terrorised for a while - and it's heading towards the High Street. Now, to me, the absolute centre of the city centre does not seem to be the best place to herd a football riot towards, but what do I know, right, I'm just a pizza boy not some kind of police mastermind (OR AM I).

Anyway, fuck it, right? Not my problem. I'm headed in the opposite direction.

Only, as I come back from the drop, I realise it sort of is my problem. Again.

Because a pretty familiar looking riot is blocking the road.

We're now on the other side of the city centre, and it is possible to go around a different way to get back to the shop, but I'll be fucked by a fucking fucker if I'm fucking going to fucking do that. It'd take like ten extra minutes, using my own petrol for no reason (petrol becomes like ambrosia - not the rice pudding - in the mind of pizza drivers who use their own cars, by the way), and just what the shitting crikey is the riot doing over HERE anyway? There's like nothing in the part of the city they are now rioting in: nearest pub is five minutes up the road, the football stadium is a good fifteen minute walk away, the fucking police station is miles away: I have a sneaking suspicion the riot police herded the fans over here just because they had no bloody clue what else to do.

Well I have a bloody clue what to do. I've got pizzas to deliver, motherfuckers, and not even Allah himself is going to stop me.

I roll down my window (why the hell do I say "roll down" I have electric windows THAT'S RIGHT MOTHERFUCKERS MY CAR IS WELL POSH) and lean out.

"Excuse me?" I ask, as loudly and politely as I can. The crowd have their backs to me, presumably because there are police officers or footballers on the other side of the riotous mess that is blocking the way back to the shop. "EXCUSE ME? Could you shift up a bit, please?"

One particularly large fellow turns around after a moment's pause, and the deep frown on his face is replaced with a look of amazement that I recognise about as quickly as he recognises me.

"Fuck me," he says, wiping sweat from his chubby brow. "You get around a bit, don't you?"

"Pizza delivery," I say, with a nonchalant shrug.

He nods knowingly. What can you do, that nod says. We are just two peas in the pod of life, trying to make our own way, establish our own rights and freedoms. I have chosen the way of the fist; you have chosen the way of the deep pan, hot and under 30 minutes or your money back. Que sera sera. God speed to you, my little friend.

God speed.

After a minute's shiftying and shuftying my fat friend manages to move the riot enough out of the way that I can climb onto the curb (on the wrong side of the road of course) and squeeze past. I give him a nod of thanks as I pass him, and shoot a cheery wave at the bored-looking riot police as I go past. Looks the mob is managing itself quite well at the moment. With my newfound blood brother organising from the rear (heh) it's no wonder.

God speed to you, my little friend.

God speed.

MEET BRIAN, PART TWO

2008-07-25T12:32:00.002+01:00

aka THE PUSH UP CONTEST.

In my first expose on the joys of knowing Brian, I looked at but one of the many facets of his character: that of his sheer mastery of the art of everyday human conversation. Today I will be exploring another element of the enigma that is Brian: his relationship with physical exercise, and - of course - the way he communicates said relationship to us, his hapless colleagues.

As I said in MEET BRIAN, PART ONE, Brian attends the gym three times a week (or so he claims, I'm not exactly a gym person myself so I've never been there to verify or deny) yet remains as portly and red-faced as ever. One favour that the gym does seem to have done our erstwhile hero is that his guns are, admittedly, rather impressive. This seems to be quite fitting to me, and quite representative of the way Brian approaches everything in his life. He decides he is going to go the gym regularly, and he sees on television or even just in the gym that guys who attend the gym regularly look pretty buff. Problem is, those guys eat a balanced and restrictive diet, as well as doing a full ensemble of exercises that test the body to its limits in every which way possible.

Brian looks at the exercise and diet regimes to achieve the physical perfection he dreams of every night in the bed he shares with his aging mother (actually I think he rents his own place, but work with me here). He realises that he just can't be bothered to put that amount of effort in. Dejected, he moves to leave the gymnasium, head hanging low, dreams of being a top bit of beefcake in tear-stained tatters.

But wait, he thinks, a bolt of clarity striking from the blue. If I just do a load of bench-presses and change absolutely fuck all else in my life, I'll still get big biceps no matter WHAT the rest of me looks like! And if I talk to people constantly about how big and well-rounded my biceps are, they won't notice the fact that the rest of me looks like a sack of potatoes that's been padded out with bacon fat!

And so it was that Brian came to talk about his biceps nearly as often as he talks about his "published works". And oh boy, you better believe it gets a little awkward.

BRIAN: Heya
ME: Hmm? Oh. Ohhh. Hi Brian.
B: I was down the gym yesterday.
M: Oh yeah? I hear that's good for you.
B: Yeah. Yeah, it was a good workout.
M: Cool.
B: I think my biceps are coming along nicely.
M: Uh-huh.
B: I mean, I think so, but I'm not really sure.
M: You're not really sure?
B: Well, I don't really know.
M: You don't really know?
B: Well, no.
M: Have you... have you tried looking at them?
B: Yeah, but, you know, I can't just take my own opinion.
M: A personal trainer, in the gym? Or just, you know, anyone there?
B: Yeah, I did ask a trainer, but I'm still not sure.
M: Right.
B: So, I was wondering, what do you think?

(stage direction: it is at this point that Brian rolls up his sleeve - please remember that we are just behind the front desk and so all the customers in the shop, in addition to anyone walking by on the street outside, can see the older man showing off his biceps, which although large are still covered with a jellylike layer of flab, to his younger counterpart)

M: Oh. Er. Yeah, that's great, man. Nice.
B: Are you gonna touch them?
M: I'm sorry, what.
B: You can't really judge them without feeling them.
M: Brian I am not going to touch your biceps.
B: But-
M: Brian roll your shirt down and make some boxes.
B: But-
M: Brian I am going away now.

He's a character, alright.

So at about 11 on one weeknight evening, not much at all is happening but Becky is pissed off with the owner and has decided that she isn't sending anyone home early if they want to stay and rack up a little easy cash at his expense. So there are four drivers and three receptionists, and Becky, and we're just sitting around on tables and worktops talking shit and eating nachos (again, at the owner's expense).

Brian decides this is a good time to start talking about his biceps, but he doesn't get to the point of rolling up his sleeves so we can all admire the flabulous gun show (I don't know if anyone has invented the word flabulous before now, but be assured I will own the copyright on it before this post is finished) before Becky interrupts.

"Brian," she says, in a sweet, caring tone of voice, "you do realise none of us are even remotely impressed?"

Brian looks at her, and his mouth opens, but for the first time since I've had the complete displeasure of knowing him, the silly sod is lost for words. Me and Ben (Ben and I?) are trying our absolute fucking damndest not to burst into laughter, but we only manage for about ten seconds before the chuckles come out.

And you know what it's like when you've been trying not to laugh. Something that would have only been a short guffaw's worth of mirth becomes the funniest fucking thing since Little Man as the pressure of holding the giggles in builds up, and up...

Yeah, we were just laughing our fucking asses off. Pretty much in his face! I mean he was sitting right next to us! In retrospect, I feel bad, but not much, and to be honest I'm over it already. Seriously. Do you blame me.

Brian looks shocked and hurt for about a second - not that anyone really notices - but then his lip curls into the indignant pout of the thwarted child and he jumps up from the counter.

"You're not impressed? Well, come on then. I'll show you. Push up contest!"

I swear on the life of Konnie Huq from Blue Peter I am not lying to you. That is what he actually said.

"W-what?" I ask him, fighting down a fresh wave of laughter as the noble gladiators fought down the savage Christians. "A fucking push up contest? What are you talking about?"

"A push up contest!" Brian retorts, the repetition adding a sombre gravitas to his challenge. "If you're not impressed, let's have a push up contest! We'll see!"

"Brian," says Ben, getting up off the counter, "you know a 'push up contest' hardly qualifies as a test of physical fitness, right?"

"It'll show us whose biceps are better!" Brian exclaims, a mad gleam creeping into his dour eyes.

"Just, please, don't roll your sleeves up," says Becky.

It's about another minute before we've managed to stop laughing enough to line up for THE PUSH UP CONTEST.

Tom goes first. He manages a paltry 9 before he collapses, and there is much jeering, mocking, and consideration of exactly how much correlation there is between his homosexuality and his complete lack of upper body strength (I'd like to clarify that Tom is actually gay... gay for DELIVERING PIZZAS HOT AND ON TIME, that is).

I go next. I'm actually pleasantly surprised when I manage to force myself to 20 before giving up, my arms groaning like a ghost who's just realised he left the ghost-oven on back at his ghost-house. There is some generic jeering, but not much, for my fellow PUSH UP COMPETITORS know they have just seen a true man pushing up.

Brian goes next. He forges on, and he makes it to 41... even though the whole fucking time we are telling him to stop and start again because what he's doing barely qualifies as movement, never mind push ups. He's doing those weird gimpy "ass way up in the air and a slight flexing of the shoulders as your nose moves about an inch closer to the ground before going up again" push ups that are the general forte of kids, women, and homosexuals (political correctness disclaimer: fuck you, this is the internet).

We are informing him of this the whole time he is pushing, but he completely ignores us, his face growing redder as he barely moves, just that slight little movement of the shoulders that seems to count as one push. I swear I have no idea how he only managed to do 41 of them: as I said, his biceps are actually fairly impressive, and I'm pretty sure anyone can do as many of those shitty "push ups" as they want. I mean, the amount of free time and dignity you are in possession of are the only two factors.

Brian climbs to his feet, a laboured effort after his herculean performance. A smug grin spreads across his face: he is the king of push ups. The king of men. The king of biceps.

Becky breaks what I'm sure Brian imagined was an awed silence.

"That was embarassing. You're disqualified."

"Yeah." I have no choice but to agree. "Back of the class, flexy."

Brian protests, quite loud and quite long, but no one listens to him. We've all developed quite a knack for tuning him out by this point, and besides, there's one competitor left to enter the PUSH UP ARENA. For some reason, the four minutes we've been playing this game have got us all - competitors and spectators - hooked on the pure adrenaline sport that is the PUSH UP CONTEST, and our attention is locked on Ben, who steps up to the plate to push like his life depends on it.

And who knows. Maybe it does.

Ben knocks out 30 then jumps up, declaring he doesn't want to humiliate the rest of us any further. He might have taken home the prize (his staff meal) that night, but in a way, I think the real winner was everyone who is not Brian.

COUNTRYSIDE CATS

2008-07-21T14:51:00.003+01:00

AND WE ARE BACK, PEOPLE! And we are hitting the road running. Or at least fighting.

Alright, as I said a few weeks back, I haven't run out of material from my last job, so expect more of Brian and the time I drove right through the middle of a street riot at the very least, but we will kick off the return to FAG TO GO with a taste of my new job.

My new job is delivering pizzas, by the way, only it is not in a city like it was last time, now it is back in my childhood home of THE COUNTRYSIDE. The job is quite different (it pays MUCH better, for a start) in that the large majority of the drops are very very close (5-10 minutes round trip) with the occassional drop that calls for you to drive to a nearby village, and when I say nearby I mean like 40-50 minutes round trip.

The amount of petrol money we get is scaled depending on distance, if you care (you don't, but I forgive you, for that is just one of the ways in which I am eerily similar to Our Lord and Saviour).

Another difference, which I discovered last night, is that animals are a lot less scared of humans. Especially at night. In the city, birds and foxes and cats make sure to stay the fuck away from the roads, and try to avoid contact with anything human or vehicle shaped in general. In the countryside, on the little back roads, when the sun's gone down and badgers are more frequent road travellers than cars, things are different.

A LOT different.

OH MY FUCKING CHRIST JUST LOOK AT IT

So, anyway, I've just delivered a bunch of pizzas to a charming young lady whose house smells so strongly of "Mary Jane" (weed, yo) that I'm pretty sure I'm high as I make my way back to my car. Incidentally, I went to the wrong house first, because - and this is another classic feature of the countryside - the road signs were sufficiently ambiguous as to make it look like a couple of the houses around the junction were existing on three different roads at the same time.

It's motherfucking Schrodinger's address, people.

The lady who lived at the wrong house was neither charming nor young. I was informed that this was "the third fucking time" I'd come to her house by mistake, and when I politely tried to inform her that this was only my second night in the job and the first time I'd come to this road, she rather cunningly responded by opening the door to her utility room and threatening to sic her Labrador on me.

Another thing that's different about the countryside: at eleven o clock in the evening, no one can hear you scream.

After amicably parting ways with the twisted old hag who DIDN'T, as it turns out, live on the Delkin, and after delivering a monumental stack of pizzas to the most articulate stoner I've ever met, I head on back to my car and fire up the engine. It starts on the second attempt, which these days is a damn good turn of events, and I'm on my way.

Only I'm not on my way, because no sooner am I round the corner than I'm slamming on the brakes, hastily deccelerating (is that a word) to stop a few feet in front of this humungous fluff-ball of a feline.

OHHHHH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT

It just looks at me, it's eyes all weird and shiny as cat's eyes are wont to be in the evening. It's sitting down, evidently quite comfortable where it has decided to rest for the night. If it was me, I would not choose to sit in the middle of a road when there is a pavement but two feet away, no matter how untravelled said road is in the later hours, but whatever. I'm not a cat. So what the fuck do I know.

I pull my foot slowly up off the clutch and start to creep forward. It doesn't take long to ascertain that the cat hasn't been afflicted with the "deer/cat in the headlights" syndrome: his eyes remain locked pretty firmly on mine as I slowly but surely get closer and closer to committing greivous animal cruelty. It doesn't take much longer than that to realise yon moggy is quite definitely not intimidated by me or my car. It's a '97 Corsa, so I'll admit it isn't the most awe-inspiring of vehicles, but come on, dude. It can still run you over.

But no. I get so close I swear there's gotta be cat hair all over my license plate, but no dice. The little fuzzy shit ain't moving. He's quite comfy, thanks, and fuck everyone else. Even people who've got jobs to be getting on with.

WHAT A WANKER

Bear in mind it's not like I can go the long way round or anything. Multiple entry and exit ways? In the country? Are you having a fucking giraffe, mate?

Next logical step, then, is to start flashing the little cunt with my brights. ON, off, ON, off, ON, off, for about twenty seconds, just flashing anyway. The kind of shit that would kill epilectics and inspire epilepsy in until-then totally healthy individuals.

Does he care?

Does he fuck.

Right. That's it. I'm done being nice. I'm done giving a shit about this cat, the people that live on this cat's street (I mean, one of them probably owns the furry twat, so a double fuck you to whoever that may be), and basically the whole of the countryside, ever. I lean on my horn, and I lean on it HARD. It's not the noisiest horn in the world, but it's plenty noisy enough. After about ten seconds I see a few lights switch on here and there up and down the street, and I suddenly remember the bitter old bitch with the energetic young Labrador and waking up the locals at this end of town ceases to seem like such a good idea.

For the record, the cat is still sitting in the middle of the road, and he's still watching me.

YON BUGGER WILL SURELY BE THE DEATH OF ME

Right. Well then. Bollocks to it. I'm getting out of the fucking Delkin and I'm getting out of it now. I get out of my car and walk round to the cat. He looks up at me, and I read the look in his eyes more clearly than I have read anything in my life (and I have read a book that was written for half-blind children).

The look says: "I win,"

I say: "No you don't."

I stick my foot out. I swear to God, Allah, Zeus, and all the other heavenly dudes that it was 100% my intention to apply gentle pressure until the little fuzzy shit had no choice but to move or be moved. Gentle, but undeniably, nudges. You know the business.

Unfortunately for both me and the feline, he decides that the presence of my shoe represents a greivous breach of the rules of our little mind game, and with a lairy hiss he swipes at my jeans, claws extended. Taken by surprise, and a little bit shot up with adrenaline as a result of the sound of angry movement coming from a couple of nearby houses, I kick out... and I don't kick out with gentle pressure.

I just fucking KICK OUT.

I think I kicked the fucking thing under a car, but I'm not sure. I know for a fact (okay, not a fact) that I didn't kill the damn bastard, because I could just about make out its outraged hissing over the sound of my own maniacal laughter as I ran back to the car, fired up the engine, and was gone before anyone knew exactly which cunt it was who was blaring his horn at 11pm on a work night.

Am I a bad person?

No. I am not.

POSTPONED

2008-07-07T22:18:00.003+01:00

Blog postponed for one week; normal service will resume when the fuck I say it will.

When the fuck I say it will is, in fact, on the 14th July. I have been spending this week with my fiancee, so not much internet time because as you know females and the internet are like hyperactive cats and a bathtub full of ice cold water: they just don't mix. Seriously. Women. Am I right?

THEY ARE SO STUPID.

DUCK THA POLICE

2008-07-04T14:40:00.002+01:00

Recently my beast of a car has undergone several traumatic incidents. Some cunt smashed my wing mirror off - I'm happy to report it has been repaired with duck tape - and that came after I accidentally drove into the back of another car while attempting the most ridiculous parallel park YOU WILL EVER SEE. Except you won't see it, because I wasn't recording it. And after all that, and as if that wasn't enough for a vehicle with the delicate sensibilities of my Corsa, one of brake lights died while I was at work.

Of course, I didn't realise this.

But I would.

Oh, I would.

So I'm driving down Wonford Hill, doing my standard thing (speeding) when I spot a police car in my rear view. It's slowly catching me up, so I ease off the gas and touch the brake a little. I always think it's hilarious how the police get to drive as fast as they like, even when the sirens aren't going and they're just on their way to the pie shop. As an aside, Marten's Pie Shop on Pinhoe Street is well decent and you should go there right the fuck now.

Anyway, I'm doing about 15 over and the law is still going faster than me, so I decide to reduce their speed before they catch me up in case they're feeling particularly vindictive that day. Normally they don't seem to give a shit how fast you're going as long as you aren't doing double the posted limit, but better safe than sorry, right? Also because I am an undeniably law-abiding citizen, as you all know from the numerous awards I have received for my community service (ignore the fact that the community service was court-mandated, and I stand by my original statement that I had never seen that orangutan in my life).

The police Focus hasn't got particularly close when it's lights start flashing. Oh no! I think. There must be a robbery in progress somewhere! I had better do my civic duty and pull over to the side of the road to let them past.

I do so, but am slightly confused when the police car doesn't whip past me but instead reduces its speed as it approaches. What is going on now? I think. This must be a particularly leisurely robbery if they are content to drive behind me all the way to their destination (I presumed their destination was a bank because bank robberies are pretty cool when you see them in the movies).

Right then. I had better start driving again. And this time I will go a little over the limit, not so much as to cause them to abandon their race to the bank but fast enough as to give them a little more time to apprehend the villains when they arrive.

Little did I realise, my friends, that the villain WAS ME.

I start driving again and manage to get up to about thirty before the siren gets turned on. It was just lights before; I figured that that meant it wasn't a MAJOR robbery. Maybe the robbers had decided to stick up a building society instead of a bank; it seems logical to presume that building society robberies would be taken less seriously than bank robberies because banks have that awesome glass between you and the cashier while building societies just have a shitty counter with a fake wood veneer on top (honestly people is there anything that screams WE DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR CUSTOM like a fake wood veneer).

So when the light goes on, that's when I know it's got serious. Maybe one of the building society staff had been shot! I don't know why that needed an exclamation mark, it makes it seem like I'm excited by the prospect of young Debbie, the Trainee Account Manager, being murdered in the course of a robbery. I am not. That is awful. Why would you think that about me.

Seeing that the police are now more urgent than ever I rationalise that I should pull over once again. I mean, before they seemed pretty chill but now they're getting noisy, and if there's one thing my mother taught me it's stay out of the way of a noisy policeman. Up until them I had always figured it was just another of her crude euphemisms about how penises are the Devil's handiwork, but apparently not. There was something lurking underneath all those gin and tonics after all. Thanks, Mum!

I get out of the way of the noisy policemen, once again pulling over to the side of the road. They're closing on me pretty fast, though, so I decide to use my initiative and I turn left down one of the side streets that pepper Wonford Hill. Wonford Hill is a pretty narrow road, and I'm not overly enthused by the prospect of having the expert repair work on my wing mirror (did you know duck tape costs 3 pounds a roll? what a rip) undone by the fuzz.

In my rear view I watch the cops zip past, continuing their journey down Wonford Hill towards the building society and the horrific crime scene that doubtless awaits them. Satisfied that my civic duty has been done for the day, I decide to carry on down the side street. It comes out somewhere pretty near the house I'm dropping at, and while it's more of a long cut than a short cut it's just really hard to get my car into reverse gear. Why go backwards when you can go forwards, I always say.

Not that I have a choice.

I make it about a mile down the road before I see something you don't see every day. I realise that's quite a vague description, so I shall be a little more specific.

I see a cop car parked across the road.

How rude, I think. I mean, it's not like I've got a FUCKING PIZZA TO DELIVER HERE.

But whatever. They are the police, after all, and that technically gives them the right to do whatever the hell they want. And if they want to barricade off a road for larks, well, that is their God-given right as members of Her Majesty's Coppers.

It's about at this point that the passenger door opens and a cop steps out, one hand up in that universal gesture which can either mean stop or I am doing a crude impression of a Native American and I am about to start doing a "rain dance" and going "pow-wow-wow-wow".

I assume it's the former, but you know what they say: when you assume, you nearly get arrested for evading the police.

In my defence, I have never been stopped by the police before. I have never even seen anyone in the process of being stopped by the police. I have seen cars at the roadside and have laughed as I drove past, watching the stricken looks on the faces of the people being bollocked by The Law, and on one occasion I witnessed about ten seconds of a high-speed chase up the M5 (that was hilarious by the way, the dude cut off up one of the exits and both of the cop cars just zoomed straight on past before stopping and REVERSING BACK UP THE MOTORWAY - collateral damage, anyone) but I honestly had no idea what the process was for police pulling people over. Why the hell don't they just get a loudspeaker and go "PULL OVER YOU MORON OR WE WILL DO VERY BAD THING TO YOU"?

Why do they just activate their flashing lights without the siren? Impressionable delivery drivers the world over are being fooled into think building society staff have been brutally executed EVERY DAY because of this shoddy police work.

All I can think as the officer approaches me is "holy fuck that guy looks like Stephen Merchant". And when he opens his mouth to speak all I can think is "holy fuck that guy sounds like Stephen Merchant". I do not inform the gentleman of this fact.

"Please get out of the car."

"Sure."

"You know why we've stopped you here?"

"No."

Stephen Merchant appears flummoxed by this response.

"You don't?"

"Nope. Did I do something wrong?"

"Uh... yes. You just pretended to pull over twice while my colleague was in the process of trying to stop you, before turning down this street and losing him entirely. Does that ring a bell?"

"...Sort of? I mean, I didn't realise he was trying to stop me."

"The flashing lights? Driving right behind you? Not bringing back any memories?"

"I..." I stop myself before I say I thought a building society was being robbed. I don't really know how that would have affected the outcome of the situation, but I would put money on not for the better if I was a gambling man (which I am, although I make a general habit of not betting on the police).

I try again. "I'm... sorry?"

Stephen Merchant sighs. I can see he is mentally noting this exchange down to work it into his next stand up routine. "Is this your car?"

"Yup."

"Only it's registered in a woman's name."

It is, you know. My mum's. A little bit of insurance dodging, if you will, although if you're aware of the cost of car insurance for young male drivers in the UK I hope you will applaud me for my efforts. Without my mother's name the first year would have cost me about a grand. A grand. My fucking car cost me £900 and you expect me to pay MORE THAN THAT to insure it? Eat a fucking dick, Direct Line.

Anyway, this is where the story sort of peters out because Stephen Merchant is actually very understanding about the whole thing - I guess being a comedian-come-copper you see a lot of crazy shit and it starts to get blase after a while - and once I've proved my identity he gives me a ticking off about the faulty brake light and tells me to get it fixed before my shift at work.

Jokes on him, I haven't fixed it AT ALL!

Cops aren't allowed to read the internet, right?

Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

A TRAGIC ANNOUNCEMENT

2008-06-30T12:15:00.002+01:00

I am going to be leaving my job in a week! No I did not punch the owner in the face; it is actually sort of my decision to go. I do genuinely enjoy the job, crazy shit happens to keep it fresh, and despite it being minimum wage tips help to boost that up a little bit. I just can't get enough hours at the moment to make it viable to work there alone, which leaves me with two choices:

Get a second job
Get a new job

I opted for option 2, which I'm coupling with the regression of moving back in with my parents for a couple of months before I move in with my girlfriend (we don't get our place 'til September). So, I'm gonna get some shitty job back in the shire, and the plus side is that I'm not paying rent, while the downside is that I'm moving back in with my parents, something I said I was not going to do. Sure, it's only a couple months, but still, I kind of feel like I've let myself down a bit.

Whatever, I'll get to see a few of my old college mates (the ones that are poor like me, anyway).

Sorry this isn't a funny post: there will be more funny posts to come, I have a backlog of stories and there's always my last week, in which I am sure a bunch of retarded shit will happen. And if it doesn't, I'll kickstart it. What the fuck do I care about repercussions? I'm leaving!

But yeah, I just thought I'd put this here as: a) a chance to whine a little bit, and b) a kind of pre-emptive "this blog will end in a month" thing. I'll probably start a new, more generic, blog after this one receives the kiss of death, if the thought of living without my writing has already become a terrifying concept to you.

Either that, or I'll go work for another pizza place.

NEWS FLASH

I saw Y-Fronts the other day. He wasn't actually doing anything particularly mental, unless you count pushing an empty Sainsbury's trolley (incidentally the nearest Sainsbury's is a good 10 minute car journey away) down the road, into incoming traffic.

He only did it for about a minute, though, and then he got bored and ambled off up an alley. As far as I know the alley he entered was a dead end, but I kept an eye on it for the next twenty minutes and he didn't come out. Maybe that's where he keeps his stash of pilfered electronics, and he was busy working out which order to destroy them in.

GROSS INCOMPETENCE

2008-06-27T11:25:00.006+01:00

This happened a few months back, and is a series of unfortunate events (and, as the title suggests, gross incompetence) that left one customer very, very happy and one customer very, very angry.

It all starts not long after I get in: in fact, it all starts with my first drop of the day. Actually, rewind a bit on that, because it actually starts with someone else's drop. Brian's, actually, and in true Brian style he cocks it up. Only - GASP - it's not his fault. Well, not entirely his fault, anyway. It's still at least partially his fault, for two reasons:

It was a mistake he could have corrected if he'd bothered to look at the ticket.
If something goes wrong it is in some way Brian's fault.

Because, you see, when the order got bagged up our manager (not Becky) put the wrong ticket in the bag. In what would later make things more complicated than they had any right to be, it just so happens that the ticket sends Brian to the right street, only the wrong house number. So Brian had the order for 23 Briar Crescent and the ticket for 27 Briar Crescent. I'm not 100% on the exact house numbers, but rest assured they were that close. One house between them (I don't know how house numbering works elsewhere, but in the UK it's fairly standard for even numbers to go on one side of the street and odd on the other). One single house.

So Brian delivers the order to 27 Briar Crescent, and by the time he gets back to the store the phone call's come in. The people from #27 were apparently pleasantly surprised at how early their delivery was, but weren't quite so happy that the order was completely fucking wrong. Especially as one of them's a Muslim and he just got a Pepperoni Supreme.

No worries, says our manager! It was a simple mishap, no problem! Someone will be coming with the right order in a second! And that someone can just pick up the first order and drop it off two doors down the road. Wham, bam, thank you mam.

But... but what's happened? Where's the other order? Where the fuck is number 27's order?

It's a good question, and it just so happens that it's one I have the answer to. Only problem is, I'm not around to hear the question, as I'm in my car, driving towards Briar Crescent. Number 27's order is in the bag on the seat next to me, and number 23's ticket is in the front pocket.

See, I bagged up the order and took it out myself approximately thirty seconds before the irate phone call came in. The manager was off doing something not particularly productive, and I was bored, so I took things into my own hands and showed a little initiative. With my classic sense of timing things as badly as possible, it just so happened that the pizza I tried to use initiative on was one with the wrong ticket attached.

Yeah, I could have checked the ticket too. Don't fucking judge me.

I trundle over to number 23 and deposit number 27's pizza. They accept quite happily and I receive a generous tip. It's not really a tip, though, more a loose collection of notes that are bundled into my hand. It's at about this point that I notice how the guy at the door is totally fucking wasted. I mean, redshot eyes, thousand yard stare, moistness around the lips, but whatever; he just gave me close to 7 pound tip on a 23 pound order, who am I to judge a man who's arseholed by 6:30?

I get back into my car and drive back. I'd like to take a second here to stress that, while in the grand scheme of things the journey from the shop to Briar Crescent is at most 1.5 miles, in reality it's one of the most time-consuming parts of the city to drive through. 30 mph limit most of the way, 20 mph limit at the end, and traffic lights every fucking half a metre. There are worse places to drive to - one time I'll tell you about this farm that is literally in the middle of the fucking wilderness - but Briar Crescent isn't exactly on our door step.

It is for this reason that I'm not overly thrilled with the news I receive upon returning to the store.

"You're fucking joking," I say, with characteristic charm.

"I'm not fucking joking," my manager responds with feminine grace. "What do you want me to do? Ring them both up and ask them to meet out the front of number 25 for a pizza swap? Off you go."

Personally, I think her idea is a good one. Why can't they meet outside number 2 and exchange orders? Oh, sure, they paid for delivery, boo hoo. In this world, sometimes things go wrong, and if you can't handle that, maybe you shouldn't be ordering pizza, baby. Or if you do, order it from somewhere that has standards when it comes to hiring.

My first stop is number 27, because I parked closer to it. In retrospect, this was a mistake. I get the pizzas off the starving Muslim and assure him I'll be back in a minute with something a little less offensive, then I head over to 23. I didn't think it was really possible, but the dude's got even more wasted since about twenty minutes ago. Still, he's coherent enough to grasp what's going on, and we make our exchange with little fuss.

On the walk back to number 27 I open the box to do a quick check.

About a quarter of the pizza is missing.

I laugh, and it sounds like a desperate man struggling to draw his last breath. What do you really expect, after all, if you leave a pizza with a man as fabulously ratted as the guy at number 23? In that situation I'd have eaten the whole fucking thing and then tried my damnedest to pretend it had never been there. At least the guy was (semi) honest about it.

I explain the situation to the man at number 27, and he's actually surprisingly okay with it. He kind of rolls his eyes at the mention of number 23, as if he'd suspected that house and its residents were somehow behind this latest mishap in his life. Poor guy; I dread to think what else his neighbours get up to.

I promise him his pizza will be with him in 30 minutes, tops, and I assure him it'll come with a bunch of freebie vouchers. This seems to quell whatever annoyance the man had been experiencing, and I head back to the store, happy that the situation is finally close to being sorted.

It ended up being Brian who was responsible for delivering the second pizza, and, in a startling deviation from form, he managed to get everything correct. Only, unfortunately for him, Maciej hadn't really been paying attention, and the poor bloke's spicy vegetarian had ham on it.

If you recall, the reason he wasn't chuffed with his initial pizza was that it had pepperoni on. Pepperoni, as in, Muslims don't eat it. As in, they don't eat ham either.

That was probably the first time in Brian's life that he got yelled at for something that wasn't his fault. I mean, he gets yelled at literally all the time... but, you know, there's good reason (see above, point number two).

It is at this point that the boss loses it and announces that, due to the base incompetence of all of us (she neglects to mention that it was her who handed Brian the wrong ticket in the first place), there WILL BE NO STAFF MEALS TODAY.

Oh no! My employee rights!

Me and Ben steal a Vienetta and go eat it in the storage shed.

Beats the shit out of free pizza.

MEET BRIAN*, PART ONE

2008-06-23T12:36:00.004+01:00

aka THE CONVERSATIONALIST

*NOTE: Brian is not the dude's real name. I use some real names, but seeing as I'm basically slating Brian non-stop I figured "give the man an alibi", right? Only I keep fucking typing his real name (which isn't Brian) and then having to go back and edit it. This is some complex shit, dogs.

This, along with the SHORT TALES OF CHAOS bit, will probably become a semi-regular feature until I run out of stories on the respective topic. Seeing as every single time I see Brian he does something either pathetic or stupid, this is basically guaranteed to be a feature that runs forever.

We'll kick things off with a brief description of Brian:

38 years old
Works as a pizza delivery guy
Doesn't own his own car, so has to drive the store's moped
Has been working in the store for 7 years but consistently fucks up simple drops
Maybe the worst poet/author in the world
Self-publishes his own "work" and tries to sell it to his colleagues
Only EVER talks about himself, or his latest project, or his favourite things; seriously he is the worst conversationalist in the world
Borderline homophobic, in the sense that he thought gays were gross when he was 8 years old and hasn't matured since then
Borderline racist, in the sense that he lives in the Southwest and has never bothered to step outside it
Goes to the gym three times a week (and constantly talks to you about it - see bullet point number six) but remains just as fat as ever

On the whole Brian is a pretty sad individual, but it's hard to feel any degree of pity for him because he's SO. FUCKING. ANNOYING.

You know how normal conversations go? Where you see someone you know, and you say "hey! how are you?" That person then responds with "yeah i'm okay, just got back from the a check-up at the dentist, how about you?" Then you respond with a comment on your day thus far, and continue your line of enquiry into the check-up at the dentist. Okay, that's a pretty fucking systematic approach to a conversation, but it's pretty standard nonetheless.

Brian's approach is to tell you how he is, and then comment on his latest book of totally shit poetry for a while. Then he does basically the standard thing for conversational bores who only really want to hear the sound of their own voice: he asks you a question about something you're likely to know nothing about.

It's the most annoying, and fucking obvious, tactic in the world. He wants to keep talking and impress you with his limitless knowledge on his latest topic of interest (which he basically researched on wikipedia - seriously his latest "book" was this "history" of Bonnie and Clyde which basically read like it had been lifted straight from wikipedia, and it had), so he casually enquires as to what you know about basic nutrition or Rosa Parks or the motherfucking beat generation.

If you just say "yeah I know about that" he presses you for information, and keeps pressing until he hits a question you can't immediately answer. Then - oh boy, then - he launches into his spiel, and doesn't stop until you just walk away. Sometimes, and I'm being totally serious here, even walking in the opposite direction isn't enough to stop him. He just turns and inflicts himself on the next nearest person.

The most common topics of conversation are his numerous published works. This is how he refers to them: published works. I suppose, technically, they are, but the fact they're self-published - and self-published by a company that churns out things that look like leaflets advertising a really poor cult - makes his insistence on calling them "published works" a little, well, pathetic. What makes it about a hundred thousand times worse is that he memorises them word for fucking word.

I'm not fucking kidding.

The other night I'm minding my own business, putting together some pizza boxes while waiting for the next drop to come out the oven, when Brian comes back from his drop. There are no other drivers around, so this is not good news. Just me and him, and you bet your fucking ass he's gonna have something he wants to tell me about.

Sure enough, he makes a beeline for me, and before I even have a chance to say "hello" he's launched into the interrogation.

"Do you know much about the Dust Bowl?" he asks.

The Dust Bowl? The fucking Dust Bowl? I'm a Theology student who works in a pizza place, mate. I've also only ever set foot in America when on holiday at the ripe old age of 10. So no, I don't know much about the Dust Bowl... but fuck off am I going to admit it without a fight.

It becomes like a game: try and convince Brian that you are more educated on a topic than him, even when his wikipedia knowledge clearly surpasses your own made up bullshit. When you win, though... it's a feeling that can't be beat.

"Yeah, sure," I announce confidently, deftly folding a box in the time it took the two syllables to leave my mouth. This is something else terrible about Brian; how he doesn't even give a miniscule shit about the job. Fair enough, mate, you're 38 and you're a pizza boy, something's clearly gone horribly wrong, but you could try making a box or at least fucking try and look busy while we're standing around. Even when me and the other studenty staff are trying to build a box fort out the back of the restaurant we manage to look like we're doing more work than Brian.

"Yeah, sure," I repeat, "I know about the Dust Bowl. That was when there was a storm and loads of shit died, right?"

Describe something bad happening as vaguely as possible... check.

But it's not enough for Brian. It's never fucking enough for Brian.

"It was a period of very severe storms that caused serious agricultural damage," he says, neatly paraphrasing wikipedia. "Do you know when it happened?"

No, Brian, I don't know when it happened. I don't know because I don't need to know, because regular everyday conversation isn't a fucking pissing contest where we compete to show each other who knows more about stuff that you can read about on the internet.

Of course, I don't say that.

"Yeah, sure, I know when it happened," I say, flashing him a winning grin as I work my way through another box. How vague will he let me get away with? Can I say it happened in the 20th century? I'm pretty damn sure it happened then. Maybe the 1920s? Or the 1950s? Or some time in between? Or before. Probably not after, though.

"Yeah, it was in the... early... 1920s?"

The look on Brian's face is one of primal triumph, and I hear the "wrong answer" buzzer from Family Fortunes in my head.

"Early to mid 1930s, actually," he says smugly, and just about vomit from regret. So close, but so fucking far... the 1930s, man, it's totally bloody obvious. But I didn't get it; I stumbled at the second fucking hurdle. Not a good showing at all. To get Brian off the scent you've got to get at least five or six correct answers, and you've got to do so with an attitude that clearly indicates that you hold a doctorate in the particular topic of conversation.

"Yes, it was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation or other techniques to prevent erosion. During the drought of the 1930s, with the grasses destroyed, the soil dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastwards and southwards..."

Of course, if you fail at dissuading Brian from unleashing a "conversation" on you, there's always Plan B. As his literally encyclopedic description of the Dust Bowl - and seriously, is there not a more interesting topic to spend your lonely evenings reading up on? (no offence geologists, you do some important work and I respect you for it) - continues, I turn and walk back through the store to the front desk.

The sound of Brian's monologue follows me for a moment, but then it begins to grow fainter. It's still continuing, though, and as I reach the front of the store and turn around I see why. It looks like it's Maciej's turn to wish he was dead (I alternate this with wishing Brian was dead, just to keep things balanced).

I let out a brief burst of laughter: I just can't help it, it's the best feeling in the world when you know you've escaped and someone else has to pretend they give two fucks. Maciej hears me - for some reason he doesn't seem to have been listening to Brian too closely - and turns my way. I grin, give him two thumbs up, take my drop, and leave.

It's a slow day, and when I get back 20 minutes later the scene is completely unchanged. Maciej's gamely trying to make some pizzas, and Brian's being Brian, probably viciously pressing the poor man to admit he knows NOTHING about tectonic plate formation.

A new drop comes out of the oven and gets bagged up. Maciej turns and actually acknowledges Brian's presence at his elbow for the first time.

"Isn't that yours?" he asks, waggling a finger in the direction of the pizza.

Brian looks crestfallen. He was this close to impressing Maciej with his knowledge of totally bullshit things! Heroically, I leap into the fray.

"I'll take it if you want, mate," I say, clapping Brain heartily on the shoulder. "You're going soon, anyway, right?"

"Yeah," he replies, smiling. "Thanks, mate!"

"No problem, mate!"

I pick up the drop and head out the door. In the doorway I pause and turn back. Brian's best effort at conversation continues, and Maciej looks like a man who just found his own severed penis in his box of Sugar Puffs.

I give the poor lad the double thumbs up again, this time matching it with the biggest, jolliest grin I can muster. Hell, he needed something to cheer him up.

Apparently that didn't work, though, because all I get in response is a covert middle finger. He really didn't need to hide it, though; Brian's so engrossed in firmly nailing the fundamentals of wind erosion that the rest of the world has paled into insignificance.

They say ignorance is bliss. Brian seems to be having a pretty good time, so I'd say there's some truth in that.

FUCKING ASSHOLE SPEAKERS REDUX

2008-06-20T11:16:00.003+01:00

otherwise known as FUCKING ASSHOLE ELECTRIC CABLES.

Note: go here if you want to read the tale of the fucking asshole speakers.

Seriously, I saw Y-Fronts, aka the Speaker Guy, last night (note: I actually saw him last night, while the first part of the story came from two or three months ago, although the date I posted that part up on suggests otherwise). The circumstances weren't quite as totally fucking insane as the last time, so I can't promise a tale that's quite up to the standards of the fucking asshole speakers, but hey, it's Y-Fronts. And where there's Y-Fronts, there's some crazy shit about to go down.

I'm just hanging out at the back of the store when I see him go past: no awkward/terrifying alleyway encounters this time. I look up from the cardboard airplane I've been constructing (good way to pass the time during a slow spell is usually to make airplanes out of the pizza boxes, once I managed to make one that flew all the way across the store and out the front door, which was probably my best day of gainful employment ever) to see a figure in an anorak hunched over a shopping trolley.

It's a bit odd that someone is pushing a shopping trolley up the high street, but not that odd. I mean, I've certainly seen odder. Y-Fronts, for example. He was pretty odd, with his incomprehensible hatred of electronics...

The shopping trolley is full of electric cable.

Huh. Could it be? I mean, it could, it's not very far fetched at all, stands to reason he'd live in the area... but really? Is it him? I think before yesterday's second sighting I'd managed to convince myself that Y-Fronts and his speaker rage were some kind of urban legend. Granted, they were an urban legend that I'd seen for myself and been scared out of my pants by, but that's what they were nonetheless.

As it turns out, Y-Fronts is quite real. Although he wasn't wearing Y-Fronts this time. A red anorak with the hood thrown up over his head is the new style, and it's for this reason that I'm not sure the electric cable carrying figure on the other side of the high street is actually him. I mean, it certainly could be, but... there are a lot of nutters walking the high street at night. Sure, not all of them are luddites of the most destructive kind, but who's to say this fellow on the pavement is on his way to destroy that trolley full of cable?

It really is full of cable; I feel I should clarify that at this juncture. It. Is. Full. Of. Cable. Imagine a shopping trolley, one of the big ones that have the little folding out bit near the handle where you can neatly slot your baby in if it starts to piss you off and you can't take any more of its shit (disclaimer: I am not a parent). It's one of those bad boys, a true monster truck of the shopping trolley world... and it's totally fucking crammed full of electric cable. I don't know exactly what kind of electric cable - I don't know what it's meant to plug into - but there's a lot of it, anyway, that's the point I'm trying to get across.

What would one anoraked man want with a whole trolley full of cable? I ask myself, slipping smoothly into detective mode (I have a bunch of modes, and also a kung fu action grip). The answer to the question is not much, I guess. I mean, unless you lived in a house that was basically made out of televisions and computers and speakers...

Speakers.

Is it him? Could it be him?

Regardless, there's not much I can do about it. Anorak is nearly out of my field of vision, and according to the computer I've got a drop due out of the oven any second. I quickly finish up my cardboard airplane and have a brief competition with Ben to see who can get their plane the closest to the supervisor's head.

Ben wins. Ben always wins.

My car is down the alley, and as I climb in I notice something a little way up the road, casually abandoned in the middle of the pavement ten yards or so away from where I am. It's the shopping trolley.

The shopping trolley full of electric cable.

A nervous giggle bursts out of my throat and I drive off, repressed memories flashing behind my eyes. Was it really happening? The return of Y-Fronts... would he get revenge on the electric cables for the way his job on the speakers had been interrupted? Just what the hell did he have against electronics anyway? Was it his job, or something, destroying faulty electrics?

Yes. That's right, his job is to drag expensive electrical equipment down a back alley and destroy it using available materials. That's a pretty common job, after all. I remember how they created a lot of positions in that industry to combat the rampant unemployment our local psychotics were suffering.

When I get back and park up the trolley of cable is unmoved. Unmoved... but not unchanged. A red anorak lies casually strewn atop the trolley, which means one of two things:

Anorak is not actually Y-Fronts at all, but simply an owner of a copious amount of electric cable, who has removed his anorak to cover the trolley in case of a sudden downpour while he goes inside his nearby flat to collect some more cables.
Anorak is actually Y-Fronts, and the disrobing has begun.

Thing is, there's no one around to be seen, so if the disrobing has begun, the only evidence for it thus far is the discarded anorak. As I walk up through the alley and back to the store, I consider that perhaps an absence of evidence is not the worst thing that has ever befallen me.

But it's not something that befalls me for long. It is, in fact, something that is quite remedied when I go out on my next drop about five minutes later.

As I step out of the alley onto the street I hear a familiar noise of frustration and sorrow. Sort of like the roar of a retarded baby dinosaur, I guess.

"These are mine! Can't you leave me alone? These are all mine!"

It's Y-Fronts, and he appears to be in some amount of distress. He also appears to be shirtless and shoeless, which is an interesting deviation from last time's dress code. I'm just happy he's still wearing his trousers. Y-Fronts might be quite a catchy handle, but there's really no need for him to remind me why I gave him that name.

He is also flanked by two policeman, who look just as frustrated as Y-Fronts. One of moves to take him by the arm but he dances out of reach, all the while keeping one hand on his trolley of cables. I guess he has something in store for them; something the local law enforcement are obliged to try and prevent.

I'm impressed by how quickly the police were called this time. The thing with the fucking asshole speakers must have unfolded over something like two hours, and no sign of the po-po throughout. This has been about half an hour, tops. Electronic serial murder is, apparently, is something the county has decided to crack down on.

As I stand, holding a pizza in one hand and dumbly watching, the same officer tries to grab Y-Fronts again. Again our titular mentalist dances out of reach, but this time he does more than that: he fucking legs it.

Well. He does his best, but is somewhat hampered by the fact that he can't bring himself to let go of the trolley. I don't know if you've ever tried escaping the law while pushing a shopping trolley full of electric cable - it's certainly been a while since I have - but from the evidence presented to me last night, I have concluded that it is not something I would recommend.

It takes about ten to fifteen seconds for Y-Fronts to be apprehended, and he's promptly marched in my direction. I take this as my cue to get back to work, and casually complete the journey to my car as if I'd never stopped to rubberneck in the first place. As I open the door and climb in, lamenting the swift downfall of the scariest man I've ever seen in just pants, I catch what I'm sure was just the beginning of a highly fruitful discourse:

Y-FRONTS: Fuck, you can't just leave my cables there like that, someone's gonna fucking steal them!

OFFICER: Right. Only, that's sort of what you did.

TAXI!

2008-06-16T11:03:00.002+01:00

As most of working hours are after the sun's gone done, it stands to reason that I encounter a fair amount of drunken shenanigans. The two most common symptoms of other people drinking too much are: pizzas that get ordered and forgotten about by the time they arrive twenty minutes later; and people trying to buy my pizzas off me as I walk them to or from my car.

Yeah, as I walk them to my car. People try to buy pizzas off me in the high street, sometimes more or less directly outside the store itself. Suggest they go in the store itself and order their own pizza, and you will be scoffed at. Drunks are apparently quite willing to offer over the going rate to procure a pizza intended for someone else, but will they pay a more sensible price for a pizza of their own?

Your bet your fucking ass they won't. Because, I guess, nonconformity, or something.

That was a bit of a sidetrack, actually, because today's post is about a less common - but still far from unique - result of the overconsumption of alcohol. This is the apparent belief that every moving vehicle in the vicinity is a prospective taxi, just waiting to ferry you and your equally inebriated friends to wherever you need to go. And pizza guys; well that goes without saying, right? I mean, they're driving around anyway! Of course they won't mind giving you a lift!

Now, most of the time I refuse any and all requests. On occasion this has resulted in some pretty hairy scenarios, but by and large I've gotta say the drunks round here aren't particularly concerned with getting violent. Turn down their request for a lift and they usually respond by mumbling something inaudible and walking away in a random direction, as is their way.

On very rare nights, however, my undeniably angelic nature gets the better of me and I consent to ferry a pisshead or two in the general direction they wanted to go. The key word here is general: they go where I go, and they get out at the end of the journey; pretty straightforward, right? I mean, whatever they think, I'm not a fucking taxi, so they're effectively hitching, so...

Most people (I say "most", it's not like I've actually agreed to give someone a lift more than, oh, three or four times) are cool with that. One guy was not, although to be fair to him I don't think genuine belligerence was at play so much as a frankly disturbing quantity of whiskey.

So, I've just done a drop over on the other side of the river and I'm sitting in my car for a moment, sorting my shit out and generally taking a (very) short break before I head back to the store. For no immediately apparent reason, the passenger door opens; I smell the reason before I see him. He stinks, like a brewery that has a sideline in bottling piss, but he's grinning, which means he's probably not going to kill me.

So far, so good.

"alright boss" he says, and promptly falls forward onto the passenger seat. He catches himself by throwing his arms out in front of me, but the look on his face isn't good. I know that look. I've seen that look on my friends' faces, and my own face, on far too many occasions.

He's going to fucking vomit in my fucking car.

"Please don't vomit in my fucking car," I plead with him, not sure if he's advanced beyond the point of being able to reason or not.

Happily, he has, and he manages to kind of push himself out of my car onto the road before he voids the contents of his stomach onto the tarmac. I would like to stress that this is in the middle of the road. Right then, though, I'm not thinking about that, I'm just celebrating the unsullied status of my passenger seat.

A few moments later the drunk's head pops up over the edge of the passenger seat, and he smiles at me. He looks, all things considered, in remarkably good shape. I give him a thumbs up, and lean over to shut the door in his face. Hey, I'm at work. I've got shit to do. Don't judge me, man.

"any chance of a lift" he queries, one eyebrow rising a little up his head to accentuate the significance of the request. My mouth opens instantly, already beginning to form the default answer (no), but then it closes again. He really is quite an amiable fellow for a drunk, and he didn't puke in my car after I asked (begged) him not to...

Fuck it. Let's do this thing!

The drunk climbs awkwardly into my car (it's a Corsa, one of the older ones - space is on the short side for a guy of my height, and this twat was a good couple inches taller than me) and settles down with a noise that sounds to be half sigh, half groan. I debate instructing him to put his seatbelt on. I mean, I know I really should - apparently it's "the law" - but any such request is likely to be more trouble than it's worth when dealing with someone as monumentally fucked as Mr Whiskey in the passenger is.

Fuck it. He'll be fine.

About five minutes later and I'm just heading into the city centre proper. Mr Whiskey hasn't made a sound the whole time; not a goddamn squeak. Which is why it takes me by surprise when he lurches forwards with a strangled cry and grabs hold of my arm.

"What the fuck?" I ask, the very epitome of calm.

He looks at me. His eyes are pools of booze-soaked despair.

"this is the wrong way" he intones solemnly, then sits back and closes his eyes.

"this is the wrong way" he repeeats, for good measure.

I consider debating the point with him. When I agreed to give him a lift I told him where I was going, and made quite clear that that was indeed where I was going. The high street. No detours. No exceptions. Pretty simple; and his response at the time had been "yeah thats cool thats where i need to be", which I'd mistakenly taken to mean that he was okay with my proposed arrangements.

Apparently not. Because this is the wrong way.

For the next couple of minutes, though, there's nothing more from Mr Whiskey. Wrong way or not, he doesn't seem concerned enough to try and alter his situation. He is apparently happy just going with the flow. Perhaps we can all learn a lesson from him: be happy with what you've got, and where you are. If life gives you lemons, slice them and add to gin and tonic.

When he next speaks - and we're pretty closer to the high street by this point - it's with a question I've heard before, and not one that (in my opinion) deserves an answer.

"can i steer"

Um, well, let me think about.

"No."

"come on man can i steer"

Oh, okay, that's a pretty persuasive argument.

"No."

"man let me steer"

"Dude. I'll stop the car and you can get out."

"what"

"I'll stop the car. And you can get out."

"oh okay man cool thanks"

Somewhere along the route our conversation took it seems Mr Whiskey got a bit lost. In the space of about twenty seconds he went from urgently wanting (nay, needing) to steer my car to completely forgetting about that desire. The best bit, for me, was how my threat to throw him out of the car was interpreted as an offer to stop for him. As if the corner of this particular roundabout was where he'd wanted to be taken. As if this wasn't the wrong way after all.

As he steps out he turns back to look at me. I smile, and give a little wave. I'm still actually parked on the corner of the roundabout, so, you know, I could do without staying there all night. The chance of getting rammed in the ass by a bus is pretty damn high, and for that reason I'm hoping Mr Whiskey gets bored of looking at me real soon.

Not that I could blame him if he didn't. Right, ladies?

Right?

There's a few more seconds of awkward pause, and then it's as if a light has dawned behind Mr Whiskey's glazed eyes. He thrusts one hand deep into a jeans pocket and produces, after a moment of frantic rustling, a small collection of coins, which he proceeds to thrust at me.

"thats all iv got is that enough"

He thinks I'm actually a taxi. This isn't the usual case of alcohol increasing confidence to the point where it seems a viable proposition to try and blag lifts off strangers in the middle of the night; this is the less common, but still far from rare, case of getting so damn shitfaced you actually think that little blue Corsa is a fucking taxi.

Now I'm really fucking glad I didn't let him steer.

I refuse to take the money, although it takes far longer than I'd have liked to explain why I don't want it. The most obvious explanation - that I am not, in fact, a taxi driver, and my car is not, in fact, a taxi - falls on uncomprehending ears. In fact, I end up spouting almost as much stupid shit as Mr Whiskey himself. I think I resort to telling him "I don't need your money because I'm rich, I've got enough money, thanks though!"

I wonder why I didn't just take his money. I mean, I'd gone out my way for him, and at the time he was really quite annoying; you'd think I deserved a little recompense for my troubles. But something about taking money off a guy too drunk to realise he's giving it to you seemed wrong to me, somehow. On the other occasions I've been in a good enough mood to give some random asshole a lift I've accepted payments in both cash and alcohol form (note: I did not drink the alcohol while driving my car, because that is not only against "the law" but really fucking dumb), but not from Mr Whiskey.

I think the ultimate reason I declined his payment was that I had a feeling he'd need the money soon. Perhaps to get a real taxi. To take him to where he'd wanted to go. In other words, to take him in the exact fucking opposite direction to where I'd driven.

God speed, Mr Whiskey.

God speed.

THE NIGHT OF GENERAL VENGEANCE

2008-06-13T11:01:00.003+01:00

I think there was something in the water last night. Something that made us all go fucking mental.

Dom (the guy who crashed his scooter into a wall about a month ago, and who recently took off someone's wing mirror) started it all. I'm not sure that all the blame can be genuinely laid at his feet, but if we just accept that and move on it shifts most of the blame away from me, which I'm quite happy with.

So I'm just sitting in a queue at the lights, waiting for them to turn green so I can round the corner and park up. A moped pulls up on my right just as the lights begin to change. I go to shift into first, not paying any attention to the moped, when- OW! What the fuck? He just bloody slapped me!

Yeah, it was Dom on the moped, and yeah, he'd just reached through my car window and slapped me across the face. The lights then turned green, and he was off before I'd had a chance to process the fact that I was a victim of a drive-by slapping. It didn't hurt, what with the clumpy gloves the bike riders wear, but still... a drive-by slapping, right in the middle of my fair city. I wasn't going to stand for this. No way.

No.

Way.

I park up and head through the alley to the pizza place. Inside, I hand over the ticket and the cash to Becky and walk out back. There he is: Dom, the face slapper. Dom, whose back is turned to me. Dom, who is moments away from understanding the true meaning of vengeance. As I close the distance between us with what can only be described as righteous haste, it crosses my mind that I don't really know how best to exact my retribution. Do I just walk up and slap him in the face? Seems a bit harsh, seeing as I haven't got gloves on, and the novelty value of the drive-by slapping did serve to reduce the severity of his crime.

I know. I'll push him. That'll be fine. Just a friendly shove. Ha ha, Dom, good slapping, have an old-fashioned push in the back in return, and we're even. What could be more civil than that? This is how the noblemen of old solved their disputes: with prearranged violence. I am, in other words, a modern-day nobleman. And Dom has offended my honour.

My panther-like nimbleness deserts me as I draw close, and Dom hears the final steps of my approach. Too late for him to do anything about it, of course, but soon enough that he starts to turn as I begin the time-honoured ritual of the shove in the back. Unfortunately for him, and for my conscience, the result of this is that I catch him horribly off-balance, and he goes flying, face first, into the fridge door.

In retrospect, the sound it made was pretty funny. Kind of like THUDCRACK, which sort of looks like a band name from the genre of Retard Metal. Dom didn't look particularly amused, though; the look was more or less one of pain. Not agony, though, and that's important: I didn't want things to escalate out of control, after all.

"Oh, sorry," I mumble, and walk back to the front of the store with a satisfied smirk plastered across my ruggedly handsome face.

"Where's Dom?" asks Becky.

"Oh, I dunno. I think he's messing around in the back again," I say, with the slightest of weary shrugs, as if to say "you know Dom, I know Dom... what can you do?"

She grunts, and gives me Dom's order to deliver. Take THAT, Dom! Not only did I slam you into a fucking fridge, I went and stole your order afterwards! That's like fucking a man's wife and then stealing your post-coital cigarette from the cuckold's bedside deck of Marlboros.

Actually, put like that, it looks like my vengeance has gone too far. One slap in the face, balanced against a shove into a fridge AND stolen custom? That's no kind of balance at all. But whatever, he started it.

This revenge is a dish served HOT, baby.

On my way out to do Dom's delivery I nearly get run off the road. I'm just driving along, minding my own business, thinking about how hilarious it was when Dom's face hit the fridge, when all of a sudden some twat in a pink Fiesta roars up on my right and cuts right in front of me. Never mind that the right hand lane is FOR TURNING RIGHT, never mind that there was a gap barely big enough to swing his shitty gaymobile into, he's going for it, because he's a MAN OF ACTION.

I slam on the brakes and react in my usual style: vigorous clapping, combined with that thing where you thrust your tongue out under your bottom lip in a gross caricature that basically means "you fucking retard". I followed this up with the obligatory middle finger, and then carried on my way.

There's a set of lights only just up the road - at the edge of this giant bitch of a roundabout - and they're turning red as I approach. Guess who I pull up behind.

Yeah, pink Fiesta. And he doesn't seem to happy at my frantic gesturing. He returns one of his own over his shoulder... and then his door opens. What the fuck? Am I about to become a victim of (admittedly self-induced) road rage in the middle of the city's biggest fucking roundabout? What if he punches me square into the middle of the road? The repercussions for traffic would be catastrophic, although to be honest I'm a bit more worried about the repercussions for my ruggedly handsome face.

He steps out. Pretty big guy, bit of a gut on him, kind of middle-eastern looking, wearing a black t-shirt and a black cap. Hey, he's wearing the same bloody uniform as me! Come to that, he looks more than a little bit like Ali...

He gets a little closer. Yep. It's Ali. I move my hand away from the door lock - which I'd quite bravely been about to engage - and roll down my window fully.

"Hey! Ali!"

He stops, evidently surprised, and hesitates.

"Why so hostile?" he shouts back after a moment.

"Why so shit at driving?" I answer, then point to the lights behind him. "You'd better get back in your car, mate."

He hesitates again, and then smiles and does as I suggest. I don't really like that smile. It suggests that bad things are going to happen. I don't like it when bad things happen. He drives off, and I follow him.

We aren't going very fast. Nope, not so fast at all. In fact, we're going at a little below walking pace, from what I can tell. And I see what's happening: Ali's obviously already done his drop, and has decided to make me as late to mine as he can. As it turns out, he manages to do a pretty good job of it. The other cars behind us begin to overtake at a pretty manic pace, horns blaring, all that shit, and I don't really have much choice to stay behind Ali for the next five minutes. After that, he makes what can only be a lucky guess, and takes the turnoff I need.

Yeah, fuck that. I carry on around the roundabout and take the next turnoff. It takes a little longer than the first route, at least it would have if Ali hadn't been crawling along it, but I do manage to get the pizza delivered on time. More or less. Thanks to some shitty roadworks, though, I make it back to the store in over thirty minutes for the total trip, so Ali had achieved his own little slice of the vengeance pie.

To add to the joys of getting cautioned by the owner for taking over thirty minutes - I practice the ancient technique of staring into the middle distance until you're pretty sure the other person has stopped talking - I return to find that my staff meal has mysteriously disappeared. Seeing as Dom was in the store, where my meal was, when I left on the drop, and added to the twin facts that I shoved him into a fridge and stole his delivery, I reach the correct conclusion pretty quickly.

Dom ate my fucking meal.

"Hey, do you want to go home early?" It's Becky.

"Looking pretty dead?" I ask, casting an eye around the rest of the store. Ali's obviously been and gone, Dom's out somewhere - perhaps even eating my pizza RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT - so perhaps this is a good time to leave. The way things have been escalating, I'd probably have broken Ali's arm only to get stabbed in the thigh by Dom by the end of the evening.

"Yeah, dead. So do you want to go?"

"Yes," I say decisively. As Becky turns to check the computer (to see how many drops I did that shift) I look over at the oven. There's a pizza on top of it.

Well... I am leaving now. So, it's not like anyone's going to be able to exact vengeance on me tonight. And that's all that matters, right? I'll leave the long-term thinking to the scientists and the tacticians. Right now, I want a pizza, and Dom ate mine, so my course of action is pretty fucking self-explanatory.

"Whose is that?" I ask, gesturing at the pizza as Becky hands me my petrol money for the shift.

"Uh... Ali's, I think."

I smile serenely.

"Perfect."

SHORT TALES OF CHAOS, PART ONE

2008-06-11T15:35:00.005+01:00

or TALK BOLLOCKS AND RUN FAST

I was doing a delivery, but not in my car. On foot. Because the person who'd phoned for delivery lived sufficiently close that it was quicker for me to deliver it on foot than in my car. We're talking serious, World of Warcraft-playing, cheeto-munching, basement-dwelling, neckbeard-wearing fatness here. Like, it was on the high street. Like, the place I work is on the high street.

It's really not a long high street.

But whatever, I get petrol money for every drop I do, so basically this delivery is money in the bank. As I casually stroll along the high street (we have to do every delivery in under thirty minutes, so another bonus doing this drop is I get to bunk off for twenty-eight minutes) I debate how to spend the promising riches of my non-petrol money. A pack of gum, perhaps. Or an ice lolly.

My attention is diverted by the sound of shouting up ahead. From what I can see there's a guy wandering in circles in the middle of the pavement, making a lot of noise and occasionally throwing his arms dramatically in the air like some kind of berserker demagogue. Clad in a dashing pink polo shirt, this becapped gentleman is wielding a can of Strongbow in one hand and a fag in the other.

Okay. Typical early evening drunken bullshit. Whatever. I cross to the other side of the road well before I get near him and just try to tune him out. As it turns out, that's a little difficult to do: he's seriously loud. More than that, he's saying some bizarre shit. My personal favourite was addressed to a woman walking past him:

"I'm not lying to you! If I was lying to you, I'd be lying to myself, and then I'd know I was lying. And then I'd have to arrest myself." (pause) "I'm not really a cop!"

Opening a conversation with "I'm not lying to you" is never going to end well.

As he carried on his end of the conversation, she responded by picking up her pace and walking away. Pink Shirt's volume rose proportionally, until the last bit - I'M NOT REALLY A COP - was roared after her hastily retreating figure.

I pass him by on the other side, like some kind of bizarro Samaritan, and carry on my merry way. About ten seconds later, though, a new noise cuts through the onslaught of warped public speaking: it's the sound of a police siren.

I stop, and turn around. The fatass up the road can wait, I've got nearly half an hour to finish my stroll up the high street. I'm about to see some POLICE JUSTICE. Speaking nonsense is a serious crime, man; I'm surprised they didn't show up with a bloody riot van-

Oh. They actually did show up with a bloody riot van.

Okay, that seems a little bit overkill, but whatever, you've got to justify spending all that tax money somehow, right? And if that means six riot police are sent out to handle this particular amusing if misguided street performer, so be it. I'm still hanging around to watch.

The door slides open and three of the cops jump out of the van. They start to walk over towards Pink Shirt, all serious and methodical and that. They haven't got their sticks out, which serves to further highlight how totally redundant a riot van is, but what do I know.

The other three cops just stay in the van. I guess they've got a pretty good handle on what a stupid idea this was, and have decided to kick back and take a few minutes of personal time. Let the eager beavers handle Pink Shirt: it's a nice afternoon, right? Too damn nice to spend it dealing with prats in pink shirts, that's for sure.

Pink Shirt notices the officers before they get halfway across the street. His reaction is a rough parallel to the stages of grief: shock, surprise, anger, acceptance, RUN AWAY.

This guy is like fucking road runner: a brief stunned pause, looking like a deer in the headlights, and then he utters two sage words:

"Oh. Okay."

Then POW! He's running, and he's doing so with surprising balance and speed for someone who'd been acting so monumentally sloshed the minute before. He really wasn't a cop, but he was faster than all of them.

Well... only one of them, really. As soon as Pink Shirt turned tail and fled, discarding the beer but keeping a grim hold of the fag, two of three riot cops who'd been crossing the street abruptly did a 180 and headed back to the van. The third cop hesitated for a moment, only for his shoulders to slump as he realised that, yes, if five of the six cops here weren't gonna chase the guy, he - the sixth - didn't really have much choice in the matter.

Off he jogs, but kitted out in his gear in the heat he never really has a hope of catching the drunken Olympian. Back he goes to the van, looking mildly dejected, and there ensues a brief but animated discussion between all six of the highly casual police officers. I didn't hear them, but I imagine they were debating the possibility of them just driving away and never mentioning the events of the past couple minutes again.

Apparently they reached the conclusion that it was quite possible, and they promptly departed, leaving in their wake nothing but a number of small clusters of people who'd been watching things unfold with a mixture of surprise and amusement.

For my part, I carried on my way and delivered the pizza with a full twenty minutes to spare. I wandered vaguely around the area after, seeing if Pink Shirt had popped up again, but no dice.

And the recipient of the laziest order in the history of orders?

Seriously fucking fat.

FIGHT THE MAN, FEED THE HOMELESS

2008-06-09T10:21:00.005+01:00

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:

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

FUCKING ASSHOLE SPEAKERS

2008-06-06T11:22:00.004+01:00

This isn't really anything directly to do with my job except that I saw it while I was at work. So I guess it basically is to do with my job.

Anyway, I park my car on this backstreet between drops, and to get from the backstreet to the main street where the pizza place is you have to walk through this alley. It's quite a narrow alley, and is often full of tramps, but it's all good. Sometimes I give pizza to the tramps (actually that's another story for another day, about how I fought the man by feeding the homeless).

So I'm coming through the alley, heading in the direction of the main street, and this hairy dude is heading the other way, dragging this massive speaker behind him. I mean massive, yeah, like that shit they have at rock concerts. Nothing too bizarre about that though; I just figured he was a roadie or something, and he was dragging it to some club for some gig or whatever.

Only later would I realise he was heading out of the city centre, not into it. No clubs in that direction! The plot thickens...

About twenty minutes later, I park my car up and see the speaker the dude was dragging. It's at the side of the road, just out of the mouth of the alley, and the guy is nowhere to be seen. Bit weird, but none of my business. Hell, it's just a speaker: what do I care? I head up the alley.

The hairy dude is heading down the alley.

He's dragging another speaker.

Same kind of size, by the looks of it I'd guess it was an exact replica of the first speaker (but I'm no expert on speakers so DISCLAIMER don't take my word for it). I give him a nod and a grunt, the universal male signal of greeting/acknowledgement, but I receive nothing in return. In his defence, it looks like a pretty heavy speaker.

I don't see the guy again for about an hour, but over the course of the next few drops I see more speakers. The second speaker was sat next to first. One drop later, a third speaker (same size, shape, etc.) is place on top of the first two. One drop later, a fourth speaker is haphazardly laid to the side of the speaker pyramid. A fifth speaker later appears, balanced precariously on the fourth.

The speaker pile built up over the course of about an hour, and by the end of it I was a little weirded out, but not too much. Maybe they'd just finished a gig, I told myself, and this roadie was lugging the speakers to somewhere out of the way to await the tour van, which was gonna roll up any second now and pack the mountain of speakers away.

Yeah. That made sense.

Too much sense, apparently.

As I walk past the five monstrous speakers and enter the alley, lo and behold I see the hairy guy again. Only this time he has a friend with him, and then friend is a five foot long piece of metal piping.

Okay, yeah, I wouldn't exactly think of myself as a coward, but in my defence, this guy was hairy, pretty large, quite possibly deranged (more on THAT later), and carrying a five foot long piece of metal piping. I just about managed to keep my shit inside my intestines and out of my boxers, and scuttled past him, pressing myself against the wall so hard I picked up a couple bruises on my back. He paid me absolutely no mind whatsoever. All his attention, all his energy, was focused on one thing, one foe, one nemesis.

I wasn't particularly keen to replace that nemesis in his attention (note for those of you who have been skimming: five foot long piece of metal piping), so I carried on my way.

I took the long way round to get back to my car for my next drop, anxious to minimise the possibility of running into Mr Speakers. No such luck: he's there, in the street, probably only a couple metres away from my car.

Happily for me, he isn't looking at my car. Or me. In fact, I doubt he even realises we exist. I doubt he's aware of anything at that moment. Anything, that is, except the speakers, which he is laying into with a ferocity I haven't seen since the schoolyard fights of my formative years.

I mean, he's flailing, he's winding up with this impractically huge length of piping and he's swinging, like BAM... only these speakers aren't going down. He's smashing, he's crashing, he's huffing, he's puffing, but the speakers remain. Maybe it's because the piping's just way too fucking long for him to really get much steam going with it, or maybe it's because they're top notch kit and they're built to last, I don't know, but the fact that they seem impervious to his frantic assault seems to mean little to him. He keeps wailing on these speakers, sweat flying from the lank strands of his mop of hair, and between the grunts of exertion I hear mutterings.

"Come on, you cunt."
"Fuck's sake, you little shit."
"Fucking taking the piss."

And so on and so forth. I get into my car and drive off, unsure as to whether I should be laughing with mirth or crying with relief that I escaped with my life.

When I pull up again twenty minutes later, he's still there. His efforts have apparently started to take their toll on one of the speakers - the casing is gone and he's beating on the insides pretty good - but god DAMN they have taken their toll on him about a hundred times over. He's shirtless, and his whole body is beetroot red with sheer exhaustion, dripping with sweat despite the fact it's now about 9pm (and this is England, so 9pm pretty much means COLD regardless of season). His hair is plastered all over his face.

My God, he looks insane.

He pays me no mind as I drive past him; no mind as I get out of the car and walk directly in front of his line of sight to get to the alley. He's in the zone. Those speakers are not going to live to see morning, unless the dude has a heart attack before then. Looking at him, I'd probably have put money on him croaking before all five of the speakers did.

When I come out and head back to my car, about one minute after I enter the pizza place (pretty busy time of night), he's not shirtless anymore.

Well. He's not just shirtless.

He's also trouserless. And shoeless. And sockless. He's wearing white y-fronts, the archetypal British underwear... and that's all he's wearing, unless you count a thick sheen of sweat as clothing. Around these parts, we don't.

Still, it's hot business wreaking revenge on a pile of expensive speakers, so, whatever, I'm not going to judge a guy with a fucking five foot long piece of metal piping. This time, however, it's a lot harder to not just break down into hysterics. I mean, sure, this is a back street, but it's still in the middle of the bloody city: there's a block of flats directly opposite this nearly-naked man. This is just insane.

As I climb into my car and shut the door, I make out another one of Y-Fronts' muttered curses over the sound of metal pipe meeting expensive wooden veneer.

"Fucking asshole speakers."

That does it. A burst of braying laughter escapes my throat and I hit the gas without looking back to see if the dude heard me, crazed giggles pealing out of my throat and showing no signs of stopping.

As I pull back into the street after the drop I'm pretty nervous: what if he heard me? What if I'm next on his list? What if the fucking asshole speakers are no longer Y-Fronts' number one enemy, and the fucking asshole pizza boy is the new top target? As I round the corner I'm reading to shit three bricks.

No one there. The speakers are there, but their persecutor is gone. I step out of my car and survey the damage. One is beyond repair: he got it good. He'd started in on the second, and by the looks of it he wasn't too far from breaking open the casing to get at the delicious electronics held within. The other three were unscathed, and probably sending up prayers to the Speaker God even as I looked at them.

Apparently - according to one of the other pizza guys who saw the end of this sordid tale - the cops finally showed up. Fucking bizarre that it took that long, to be honest: like I said, a block of flats right in front of him, and every person in the place was probably able to see the musical carnage taking place on their street. I suppose, on reflection, I could have rung up the po-po, but in my defence, and despite how terrifying it was at a couple of points, it was really fucking funny.

As the cops dragged him down the street (he didn't go peacefully), one of them carrying Y-Fronts' clothing over his shoulder, he could be heard (quite clearly, apparently) to lament that he wasn't able to finish those fucking asshole speakers.

I debated finishing the job in honour of Y-Fronts, but decide against it. The pipe looked pretty heavy; and besides, I don't really have the physique to go topless.

POOR OR A BITCH? THE AGE OLD DILEMMA

2008-06-06T11:21:00.000+01:00

In continuance of this money-grubbing theme from the last post, I'm going to add WEIRDOS #4 (alternatively WEIRDO #4 and WEIRDO #5). This was a young couple who argued for about two minutes over whether or not to let me keep the change. Two minutes, arguing on the doorstep (and this wasn't on some private cul-de-sac, it was basically in the middle of the city centre), right in front of me, over whether to let me keep the change or not. Now, if the order was worth 5.49 and the girl had just given me a twenty, I could get down with the fact that she was arduously demanding to get the change back. That's cool; that's some serious dosh.

As a matter of fact, she had given me a twenty. But the order was worth 19.79

That's two minutes of arguing, in public, over 21p. This woman's dignity was apparently worth less to her than 21p. Finally, someone with as little dignity and spare cash as me.

Or she was just a bitch. Probably that. The bitch thing.

THE MAN FROM THE SHADOWS

2008-06-06T11:03:00.003+01:00

..AND OTHER UNSAVOURY CHARACTERS I MET LAST NIGHT

Holy hell, the weirdos wanted to eat pizza last night.

WEIRDO #1 was the man who smelt a bit like mouldering vegetables and seemed to have some kind of split personality disorder. Now, I don't want to make light of people with that disorder (or similar psychos), but man he freaked me out. He opens the door, stares at me with cold, dead eyes, and says "I don't want that". Then he points at the pizza I am holding. The pizza he ordered.

"Uh... you don't want this?" I ask.
"No."
"Oh... okay, well I'll be off then."

I turn to go. Whatever, it's not like people being jerks is particularly uncommon in this job. Some people in particular seem to think I don't get paid if the pizza doesn't get delivered, so they try and use this as leverage to haggle with me over the price. What they don't realise is that if the pizza doesn't get delivered, not only do I still get paid, but I get to eat the pizza. So, yeah, whatever, it's not like I'm crying blood over this guy being a douche.

I make it about two steps down his overgrown garden path before his voice peals out behind me.

"Oh man, that smells delicious! How much do I owe you?"
"Uh... 11.49?"
"Excellent."

He hands me a twenty pound note.

"You can keep the change."
"Wow! Thanks!"

I turn to leave, the man's insanity forgiven in an instant. An £8.51 tip? I don't make that in a fucking hour. Hell, I barely make that in two hours. What a hero this man is, I think as I make my way down the garden path for the second time. Also for the second time, his voice brings me to a halt.

"Excuse me?"
"Yes?"
"Can I have my change, please?"

WEIRDO #2 was THE MAN FROM THE SHADOWS. I go out to this shitty block of flats, which as usual is pretty poorly lit as you walk up through the stairwells. That's normal; what isn't normal is when the guy opens the door to his flat and it's ABSOLUTELY PITCH BLACK INSIDE. If there were rooms back there with the light on, they must have had doors that were perfectly fitted to the doorframe, because I couldn't see a fucking iota of light in there. And if the doors were that precisely fitted, that'd be the first time I'd seen good craftsmanship in a council flat round these parts.

When I tell him how much it costs, he mutters something, and melds back into the darkness. I hear a door open, but I see nothing. Nothing. All is blackness. When he returned, it was like he apparated or some Harry Potter shit like that. One minute, blackness, the void, oblivion, the sheer nothingness of his flat threatening to suck me in and swallow me whole... the next, a pasty dude in a foetid-looking dressing gown is standing so close to me I can make out the hairs on his chin through the gloom, thrusting a wad of filthy notes in my face with another barely-audible grunt.

On the other hand, this necromancer (or sexual deviant, whatever) told me I could keep the change, and unlike schizo-guy he actually followed through on the offer. All hail the necromancer.

ALL HAIL THE DARKNESS

WEIRDO #3 wasn't so much a weirdo as a massive cunt who I swear, one of these days, I will have my revenge on. He was sitting on his fucking sofa as I pulled up, I could see him through the window, but when I ring the bell, he doesn't get up and move. I ring again. Nothing. I knock on the door. Nothing. I knock harder. Nothing. I knock so fucking hard the door almost flies off its hinges.

Nothing. My knuckles are raw and there are going to be bruises in the morning, but apart from that, nothing.

So I walk round to the window and look through at him. He stares at the television. Tentatively, I reach out and rap my knuckles against the glass. Nothing. He continues to stare at the television. I knock a little harder. Nothing.

Is this dude deaf? I ask myself. Yeah, he's probably deaf. What the fuck do I do now? Do I... do I throw the pizza through the window? That's probably not in the employee handbook.

Just then, the door opens and the dude is standing there, grinning from ear to ear.

"Sorry man," he says. "I just love messing with delivery guys."

The smile that appeared on my face was wide and outwardly sincere enough to pass muster, but if you looked closely I'm sure you'd have noticed that it didn't reach my eyes. My eyes, which contained nothing but bottomless hate, endless malice, and the inevitability of gruesome revenge.

"Oh," I say. "Cool."

Maybe he got wind of my murder-vibes , because I got a pretty generous tip off the cunt.

It doesn't matter.

He's still going to pay.

------

Unfortunately, weirdos 2 and 3 were the only good tips I got all night. Pretty much every fucker who paid by cash gave me the EXACT MONEY, right down to the last bloody penny. Hey, yo, I don't care if you want your change, I always want my change when I'm the one paying, money's tight all over, I get it: but seriously, stop being such a stingy cock and making me wait while you count out penny after grimy penny. Be adventurous; break that twenty. The pizza boy's not gonna run off with your change (unless the change is over five pounds, in which case I ~~probably~~ definitely would).

OMG IM RICH (aka OMG 1ST POST)

2008-06-06T10:57:00.001+01:00

Psych, I'm not actually rich. But I made about thirty quid on tips and shit last night, which is on top of whatever I get as a wage whenever the next paycheck comes in. Having become practiced in the art of scraping by with absolutely no money because I was too goddamn lazy to get a job, having some disposable income, no matter how small, is pretty amazing.

On the other hand, I'll probably spend most of the money on petrol.

Oh, and I got overtime as well, 'cause one of the other drivers managed to drive his scooter into a wall (not sure how, although the fact he gets through a tenbag of weed each and every shift might have something to do with it). Staying on 'til close is not only awesome but fucking awesome, because you get your pick of all the leftover pizzas and food that didn't get delivered for whatever reason. Hence, I took home one potato wedges, one cookie dough, and one vegetarian pizza with barbacue (how the fuck do you spell that word? barbecue? barbeque?) sauce. It was a feast that would have shamed the ancient romans.