Even if you could explain that, over the phone, to someone, well enough that they could explain it to the person that’s going to cut your pizza, it’s still more difficult. As mentioned earlier, with 8 pieces, it’s just cutting it in half over and over. This method involves eyeballing five equidistant points along the crust and going from there. *
Remember, you only have one shot. If you screw it up, the person either gets a mangled pizza or they have to wait for another one to be cooked.
*And, in fact, IMO, the pentagram makes this harder. You don’t need all that extra work. Once you have the five equidistant points, that’s all you need and the pentagram isn’t going to help you deduce where they should be. Bisecting angles is always going to be easier than this.
I don’t think anyone here is having trouble visualizing it.
The problem is skepticism: that a minimum-wage pizza slinger even knows what a pentagram is (by name), that they understand the relationship between the pentagram and “10 even slices”, that they can visualize a pentagram (or more to the point, visualize the points of the inner pentagon enough to use them as the second reference point for each cut).
And more critically: that they would care enough to remember before going on autopilot and making the customary four cuts. They sure as hell won’t care enough to remake the pizza after that.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Why not? It’s a typical High School job. I worked at a pizza kitchen when I was 17 and ended up getting a graduate degree in engineering at a top university, became a self made multimillionaire and retired at 56 in Santa Barbara. That post stinks of privilege.
I’m playing the odds here. If you’re counting on any meaningful functional familiarity with geometry in this setting, you’re bound to be disappointed.Your exceptional case (other than being apparent stealth bragging) is irrelevant to this discussion.
To give credit where credit is due, I did the 2-d diagram by hand, because it’s quick to do, but the 3-d one—well it’s also easy, but I just linked to Wikimedia where somebody already uploaded it.
And then you go completely insane from contemplating the insignificance of human existence in a universe populated by indomitable creatures from obtuse dimensions:
Was it worth it? Was it really worth it to have a ten-slide pie?
A pentagram may summon a hungry daemon or two, who (unfortunately for you) will probably not be satisfied with a couple of slices of pizza, but due to the flat, essentially Euclidean nature of the pie you will at least avoid getting encysted in the necrotic folds of the womb of Nehilim; worst case, you’re only facing an eternity of unimaginable torment.
I came in to suggest you should have given up as soon as the guy on the phone said “no” initially. All you did was convince him to cut it the way he did. Ask for it to be sliced in 16 pieces, order two small pizzas cut in to 6 slices each, do something they will agree to. It’s one thing to ask, maybe they would have said “Sure, we can cut in 10 pieces”, but they didn’t and you shouldn’t expect a good result by talking them into trying.
My first job in high school was at a pizza place and my job was to slice the pizza. Yup, I was pretty much on automatic. I was very good at giving customers even slices, but if you suddenly wanted 10 slices on a pizza that should have 8, well, you’re not getting even slices. I worked there for less than six months, so maybe with more experience I would have been able to make better slices on the fly.
Which would be unhelpful if the coffee vendor didn’t know what a French press looked like. Particularly if the coffee vendor didn’t know what a French press is. Which is evident if the coffee vendor didn’t recognize the phrase “French press” as somehow related to coffee.
