THANK You!
and …Exactly! Too damned many people aren’t clear about what they want. I have had more problems of this nature with plain old American speaking Americans than with any person who is ESL.
I owned a sword of ice and fire once. It was always fire when I wanted ice, and vice-versa.
Nice post, Sampiro 
When I worked at Domino’s people would call in and ask for a topping on half of their pizza. I usually asked them “Which half”? It was amazing how often this confused people.
I was not a useful employee. 
Amen. Communication skills are lacking. Part of employee training isn’t mind reading.
This was my thought.
Another Doper in a not so distant BBQ gave the brilliant advice of remaining cool and saying, " I’m sorry, I’ll have to call for a manager to authorize this." and remain perfectly unruffled. It annoys these buttwipes and really, you are not paid enough to handle these people at all.
Secondly, I love Costplus.
Or: People who threaten to call lawyers don’t have a legal leg to stand on in their so-called argument.
Someone did that to me once. I said the middle half. The guy on the phone wasn’t ready for someone to respond in kind. Me, I think up the same smart-ass questions, so I’m usually prepared to respond.
My pizza came in normal.
When I was an usher at a movie theatre, we offered three types of soda: Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. One night, we ran out of Coke. A customer insisted that the law required that we have Coke all the time.
I see what you’re saying too, but I disagree that it’s a stupid question. Say her boss asked her to call and order enough pizzas to provide two slices for each of their 60 employees. She likely assumed (as would I) that an employee at the pizza place would know how many pieces their pizzas are generally cut into, and so assumed she could find out and then do the math to determine how many large pizzas she would need to order.
I think it would have been more unreasonable for her to call and say “I need 120 slices, how many pizzas do I need?” which would mean that the employee would still have to know how many slices the pizzas are cut into, which was her original “stupid” question, AND have to then figure out how many she needed, and probably end up coming on here and saying, “Why didn’t she just ask how many pieces our large is?”
The bottom line of course is still that after the employee stated he didn’t know (though it would have been awfully nice if he had said he would find out) she should have given more details about her needs instead of being rude.
I’m still puzzled as to how an employee of a pizzeria wouldn’t know how many slices to a pie. Isn’t there generally a standard within a pizzeria?
If this, or a similar circumstance were the case, then she would need to STATE this. How hard is it to explain what you need and why to someone rather than falling into some ridiculous “Alice and the White Rabbit” conversation.
I agree, a semi-astute partly mind-reading pizza employee might have been able to de-code her question as what you’re saying. But if he’s got 5 other orders on hold and a line out the door, his ESP might be on a break.
I haven’t worked in a restaurant for about 15 years, but I did a bartending stint at a chinese restaurant while I was going to college. A lady called up and basically wanted ME to tell HER what she felt like eating!
I was pretty busy, but I tried to accomodate her by naming off 5 of our really good standbys. She kept saying “naaah, no…what else?” To each “no, not that” I gave her another suggestion. And I kept having to put her on hold to wait on customers who were actually present and knew what they wanted.
It was getting busier and busier and finally I politely suggested that she might have better luck if she just came down and had a looksee at the menu (we didn’t deliver anyway, so she’d have to come and pick up her order). She didn’t want to do that either, she wanted to order something ahead of time so that she didn’t have to wait.
Then, in the nicest way possibly, I told her that I needed to take her order, or possibly have her call back when she had a better idea of what she wanted, and that because of the in-house customers it wasn’t possible for me to read the menu to her (as she seemed to be wanting me to do). At that point the bar was pretty full of dart night regulars and overflow from the restaurant. I explained that if she wanted to, she could come to the bar, get a menu and then I’d expedite her order, also it would be quicker (the cooks tried to put bar orders ahead if possible since dine-in customers generally aren’t in much of a hurry) and less crowded in the bar.
At that point she said “just a minute” and put her HUSBAND on the phone. He said “You made my wife cry”! Once I explained what she was trying to get and that she had no idea what she wanted (other than none of the several popular items I’d already named) he finally confessed that she was pregnant! SHeeesh!!! Buddy, get your ass in the car, come over here and YOU read the menu to your wife and help her decide what she wants.
Sometimes idiot customers are idiot customers and frankly I don’t believe that they’re owed mindreading and mollycoddling because they can’t clearly and concisely communicate what they want!
In my NOT so humble opinion, if the pizza clerk had babied her along by trying to figure out that she wanted to know how many people a certain size of pizza would feed, that it just encourages that sort of person to be even more helpless and unintelligible the next time!
Grrr, sorry, off my soap box.
I don’t know, generally when I order pizza they take the choppy thing and just WACK WACK WACK! I’ve never seen them stop to count.
Besides Shakes’s original post didn’t say that he refused to tell the customer, it just ends by saying he asked another employee and the other employee didn’t know either. He doesn’t say how old he was, but given the general age and level of ummm…interest a fast food employee has, I’m not surprised that they wouldn’t really know off the top of their heads.
Besides, the customer in his original post didn’t even give him a chance to try and figure out what she wanted, she jumped down his throat the second he answered “I don’t know”.
A reasonable person, after hearing the “…but it’s an 18” pizza part," would have then revealed their reason for needing to know, and NOT expected a teenaged boy (sorry shakes, I’m assuming you were pretty young back then?) to read her mind.
And for all we know, she wasn’t trying to feed a group of people at all, maybe she had a serious superstition or phobia against certain numbers of pizza slices!
To be frank, although my uterus makes me a crazy person at least once a month, I cannot sympathize with the pregnant lady, as I don’t believe that gestating a fetus would make your brain completely incapable of reasoning. Yes, she may have cried over the person being nice and rational with her, but that gives her no right to sic her husband on you.
I’ve had people try to get me to read them the menu (which was above my head behind me on the wall) on several occasions when they were standing right in front of me. This was on a college campus, so there’s really no way that the students doing this were illiterate; they were ill-prepared for a world that wasn’t going to mollycoddle them.
Then her boss is the stupid one. “Two pieces” of what size? There are some edge “pieces” of a square cut pizza that are less than 3 square inches in area. Is that going to feed someone as adequately as the 4X4 piece in the middle?
Buying pizza by the number of slices, unless you know the pizzeria, they shape they cut in and whether or not their employees are consistent and careful in cutting (and the chances of all these go down the better the pizza joint), is just an exercise in futility. Area of the pizza - as communicated by diameter, is a much better indicator, and the employee provided that.
Yes, I agree he could have tried mind reading and telling her how many people it fed, but he tried mind reading once already (with the 18" information) and got his head bit off for it, why should he try again? If she would just ask a better question, she’ll get a better and quicker answer.
OK, this made me giggle. If my boss ever said to me: “Order enough pizza to feed everybody exactly TWO slices” I’d lose all hope for the company I worked for. Being that, my boss is incredibly stupid.
When the lady called, I got the impression that she didn’t KNOW how large a large is. That’s why I told her it’s an 18" pizza. I assumed (my mistake) that she could do some simple arithmetic and get a general idea how many people that would feed.
BTW, CanvasShoes nailed it. I was a teenager at the time.
As far as the slices go: If I recall correctly Pizza hut’s large has 12 slices; the place I worked for has 8 slices. But guess what? They’re both the same sized pizza!!
Or so it would seem, to the untrained eye. 
I don’t think that most pizza chefs cut the pie completely wack wack wack randomly. There do seem to be industry standards. It’s not like they cut around radially. The cuts are done across, which is why you always see an even number of slices. Normally it’s one vertical, one horizontal, and two diagonal. 8 slices. Some places will cut a small pie into 6 slices. A local place here cuts them into 4 slices (they are the size of a toilet lid and as rigid as a wet paper towel – but tasty).
I’m not even a huge pizza fan, but even I know this. For a large pie, the answer is 8. Period. I’m surprised that someone in the industry would not know this. The answer would never be “Gee, ma’am, I’m not sure. Three? Seventeen? One hundred forty two? Negative a billion?” The answer is 8.
[QUOTE=nashiitashii]
To be frank, although my uterus makes me a crazy person at least once a month, I cannot sympathize with the pregnant lady, as I don’t believe that gestating a fetus would make your brain completely incapable of reasoning.
[QUOTE]
Slight hijack/
As someone whose uterus doesn’t make me crazy on a monthly basis, and who prides herself on her rationality, I will tell you that at least once a pregnancy I found myself completely incapable of reasoning. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Many, many women have this more often during pregnancy.
This does not excuse her behavior.
/hijack
You’ve obviously never eaten at Pizza Hut. (Not that it’s a bad thing)
Customers insisting that they know ‘the law’ requires that store owners do one ting or another that is silly remind me of the trials inActs of Gord.
‘The law says if you have a big TV display unit you have to let me play games on it!!!’
One of these days, I’d like to start a pizza restaurant called “Prime Pizza,” wherein the number of slices per pie will be… well, you know.