would you like a side order of colon cancer with that?

Ok so aside from the fact that I am directly contributing to the exaggeratedly premature deaths of people I went to high school with and motorcyclists from Bouctouche by encouraging them to clog their arteries with the greasy goodness splayed out in an all you can eat buffet, and from the fact that in my men's size medium button up collared work shirt i look, well, there's no easier way to say it - hideously unattractive - and aside from the fact that I have a slick layer of grease on my face by the end of even the shortest of shifts, aside from all that, i actually really like this job.

I've made an average of 7.50 an hour just in tips the last two shifts, that's a dollar more than I'm making in normal wages per hour. The people I work for, and with, are so nice, and even the customers are shockingly patient and friendly. I got thrown in off the deep end yesterday, sent onto the 'floor' after an hour and a half of orientation. So far no spills, messed up orders or fingers on the pizza as I carried it out.

The best part is the training manual and the Pizza Delight 10 point system...a sort of timeline of how to get people in and out in under an hour. They give helpful hints such as mini scripts you can use to sneakily 'upsell' someone's order..basically pressure them into ordering appetizers and getting the large garlic fingers instead of the medium, that sort of thing. By the way, and this one goes out to the Ontarians, did you know that Pizza Delight actually invented Garlic Cheese Fingers? We're supposed to work that little fact into our 'script' as often as we can. I like my manager because he seems to recognize that the corportate branding stuff is all bullshit, and says he only mentions it because they send a 'mystery shopper' in every month to check how things are going. I was curious to know if the mystery shopper was the guy in the 1995 Van Halen World Tour tshirt who came in yesterday reeking, and i mean like from across the room reeking, of weed and ate from the buffet without stopping for at least 45 minutes. What a good costume that would be!

I've got to go eat cos I'm back for my first 5 hour shift in an hour's time. We get 50% off of the restaurant food but seriously, after looking at all the disgusting scraps from people's plates and watching the way that people can shovel in multiple platefuls of that food without seemingly taking a breath, like pigs at the trough, I really don't think I'll be taking advantage of it very often.