Writing - Pizza The Great Equilizer

Writing - Pizza The Great Equilizer

A neat piece of writing from muddyescapeartist:

One of the things I love about pizza besides it's deliciousness is that it levels the playing field. Everybody eats pizza. Well, ok, not EVERYbody, but damn near. As a driver, you are welcomed to people's homes - poor homes, rich homes, your run-of-the-mill upper lower middle class homes, hotels, businesses - and greeted by all types of people - drunk people, happy people, stingy bastards, students, the elderly, the insane, the kindred spirits, animal lovers, athletes, the infirm, and those people that always try to get a chuckle out of you in their two-minute window at the front door.

So often these people get reduced down to a number, specifically the dollar amount that they tip, but these people are beautiful! Even the shitty ones, the ones that pay in exact change, the sad ones that are trying to fill a void in their soul with a tasty midnight pie.... these people are just a microcosm of our society, a near perfect statistical representation of the world that we live in, and yes, I love them! I still bitch about them at times (who doesn't?), but without all the crazies, wouldn't our lives be a whole lot duller?

Perhaps not all delivery areas are as diverse, but I've had the pleasure of taking pizzas into lakeside mega-mansions, ethnically populated trailer parks, backwoods cabins, sprawling apartment complexes and the ticky-tacky houses of working-class suburbia. I am humbled to be given a glimpse into how the other sort live. Sometimes I am frightened, other times awed, by my experiences on the road. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

I have never felt as connected to a town as I do after I have delivered there for a while. You get to know the best and worst of your community. You get to feed the hungry masses. You get to have funny, awkward, creepy, angry, and drug-induced interactions with people that you would never have chosen to socialize with otherwise. You may never be 'equal' to your customer, but you are given a small window, a few minutes, to prove your worth in some seemingly insignificant but potentially positive way.

Don't miss your chance!