Last night, Chris and I were relaxing in the living room, watching an episode of House. At one point in the episode, Dr. House has the team meet him in the parking lot of the hospital. The following scene takes place:
House has driven Colossus, a bright yellow-and-blue monster truck, right into his handicapped parking spot (and several others). He's got to lower a rope ladder from the window just so the team can climb in, which they all do.
As House and his team are careening around the city, discussing medical diagnoses in the giant monster truck, Chris turns to me.
"You know," Chris says, "that's not how you get into a monster truck."
ME: Hunh?
CHRIS: You don't lower a rope ladder and climb in through the window. You get in from underneath.
(Pause)
CHRIS: And also, you can't fit that many people in the cab. There is no backseat in a monster truck.
Uh-oh, somebody call FOX. The screenwriters need to brush up on their redneck.
Things have been a little quiet around here lately, I'll be the first to admit it. Work has been absolutely insane, 12 hour work days six days a week. There are days when the weather is beautiful and I've accomplished so much and I love my job, and then there are days when I have to go home and cry for an hour on my lunch break. You know, the usual highs and lows.
And not that there isn't a lot to talk about. But it's all work. In fact, a co-worker and I were just commenting on how we could write a book about all the crazy stuff that happens in our jobs.
But I don't talk about work on here, namely because there are a lot of very sensitive issues that we deal with that involve lawyers and the government and blah blah blah.
In other words, you know your job might be a bit high profile if a bomb scare means that Homeland Security comes out to pay you a visit. In fact, your job might be high profile if it gets a bomb scare. (Don't worry, it wasn't a bomb.)
But this one thing is almost too funny to be real. And since I don't have much else to talk about...
In the course of what we do, we sometimes have to employ road flaggers to divert traffic around our operations. This can cause some delays to the normal traffic flow, which of course we minimize as much as possible, but still it results in some unavoidable traffic stops. We occasionally get complaints from members of the public who are affected by our work.
This is an actual complaint.
A gentlemen called to tell us that he had eaten at one of the local restaurants that day. Unfortunately, his meal didn't sit too well with him. He was driving back to his house, but it took him longer than usual because of the traffic delays from our flaggers. And, well, he didn't make it home in time. And he had an accident.... in his pants.
Oh yes, you read that right. He called to complain that we made him crap his pants.
Let's just take a minute to appreciate how much I love pizza.
Although, ironically, I didn't like pizza so much when I was growing up. This is ironic because when I was growing up, my father owned a pizza restaurant.
When I was about 8 or 9, my parents hauled myself and my younger brother out to this small university town in Kansas. My father was going to open a pizza place. He bought a space from another pizza place that was going out of business. The place was located across the street from campus, and the previous owners had hoped to cash in on all the hungry college students. The problem was, they didn't offer delivery. They didn't think this would be a problem, seeing as how one of the main campus dorms was right across the street. Newsflash: college students are lazy. Why would you walk across the street when you can pick up the phone? A-duh.
Here are the three elements for a successful pizza restaurant in a college town:
1) Be cheap
2) Be open late
3) Offer delivery
My father opened a business that offered cheap, tasty pizza, and on the weekends you could even get delivery as late as 2am.
Also there was an often played radio advertisement involving the phone number that was so catchy, pretty much everyone in town had the phone number memorized.
(Oh yeah, if you know what song I'm talking about I bet you're singing it in your head right now.)
And there you have it. Ten years later, and I was that college student, living in the dorm across the street and calling in my order for delivery. You see, sometime between 8 and 18 I had fostered a serious fondness for pizza.
After my brother and I had both graduated from high school and my parents became empty-nesters, my father sold the business to a long-time employee and my parents moved to Michigan.
The business is still there, and although competition has diminished its popularity from what it once was, it's still selling pizzas to college students, living on in moderate obscurity.
That is, until Web Soup got a hold of one of their super cheesy (no pun intended) television commercials:
Ah, pizza of my childhood. May you live on in infamy.
Last night, Chris and I were relaxing in the living room, watching an episode of House. At one point in the episode, Dr. House has the team meet him in the parking lot of the hospital. The following scene takes place:
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