I signed up for the Army right after high school but my reporting date wasn’t until November so I had a few months to kill.  I got a few jobs to make some quick loot and because my dad wouldn’t let me just dick around the house all day riding my skateboard.

I worked at Pizza Hut all through high school as a cook but now I was eighteen and was mature enough to run the joint so they made me a manager.  Kind of an odd decision by them since I was also fired from the same Pizza Hut a few months earlier for throwing the ingredients at customers.

As a delivery driver I never delivered a full pie.  I found a way to cut pizzas into eight large slices and one small slice.  When I was driving I would reach in the box and pull out the small piece for a “driving snack.”  Then I’d jiggle the box and the cheese would melt in the box so you couldn’t tell a piece was missing.  Genius.  An order of twelve hot wings became eleven and an order of bread sticks was five not six.  In my four years of delivering pizzas I never had one complaint.  Tricks of the trade and/or stealing?

When I wasn’t driving, I was the store manager.  At the end of each night I would lock $200 in the safe for the morning crew so they had some cash on hand when they opened.  One morning I got a call from the owner, asking me where the cash was.

I was 100% positive I ‘d put the money in the safe but it just wasn’t there.  I was furious! I didn’t steal it but what could I say?  The owner made me pay him the $200 out of my own pocket.

I knew something was fishy, so that night after I locked up, I sat outside the store in my car… and waited.  About an hour later one of the morning cooks, this dude Rob, pulled in front of the store.  Rob, like me, had signed up for the military and was going away to the Navy in December. We had friendly arguments about Army vs Navy but it never really escalated to anything.

He unlocked the door and waltzed in.  I snuck in behind him and followed him to the safe.  Guy was caught red-handed.  He’d stolen my keys and made a copy.  Then he looked over my shoulder and got the combination to the safe.

I couldn’t believe this kid had such huge balls to do it two days in a row.  I wanted to call the cops but I knew him, I have a heart and I wanted to give him a chance.  We agreed that if he gave me the cash and he quit the next day I wouldn’t say anything.  He was the morning chef which meant he had to come in at 7am and make all the pizza dough for that day.  Making the dough was a ton of work and I didn’t want to fire him and then have to be back at 7am to do all that work myself.  He gave me the $200 and I went home.  Problem solved.  I got my $200 back and he was quitting in the morning.

The next day was Friday, the busiest day of the week.  I got to work around 5pm, when the rush was about to start.  I talked to Rob and we were all good.  He’d made all the dough for the day and told the owner today was his last day.  Everything was water under the bridge.

The rest of the night was as thrilling as any other night at a pizza delivery store.  Around closing time Rob came back to the store and I thought he was gonna go postal and start shooting the place up but… I couldn’t be so lucky.

“Hey Chip, I thought you’d want to know that I took a crap in a batch of dough and pissed in the rest. So you’ve been serving poop and pee pizzas all night.”

I’d just served 500 plus pizzas, eaten one myself and even delivered a pie to my parents.   Probably not the last time I ate or served poo pizza.

Stay classy Navy.

(Side note: Rob was discharged from Navy basic training and sent back to Texas for being insane.  He put his arm in the bars at the foot of his bed, flipped over the top and broke his own arm.)