No Sides

I was at the Mall the other evening replacing some lost sunglasses, and was hungry as it was that cheese-and-crackers time right after work, and I stopped by the Sbarro stand in the food court to get a pizza slice.

The guy behind the counter came up ready for my order. "A slice of pepperoni, please," I said.

And he replied, with a slight smile, "And I know enough not to ask you if you want any sides..."

This goes back more than a year, from when I first moved here and was on a personal crusade to improve American customer service practices. This guy, a tall guy with a friendly face and older than your usual fast food worker so perhaps the manager, took my order one night, in very similar circumstances - Mall trip after work, grabbing pizza for an evening snack - and after I said I wanted a slice of pepperoni, he recited a list of available side dishes as if from a script that Corporpate had instructed every employee that they had to say for each order: "Salad or breadsticks?"

But he said it not in the tone that he was suggesting some optional extras that I might consider but didn't have to have, you know, with a rising tone at the end of the question, like "Any salad, or maybe breadsticks?", the tone familiar to us all from the "Do you want fries with that?" question.

No, he pronounced the question with the falling tone of the waitress rattling off the list of available salad dressings, like, you get one of these anyway with your order so which one would you like, "Salad, or breadsticks."

So I scolded him about it. I told him that he shouldn't make it sound like they were included if they were extra, and that it was the tone of his voice that caused the confusion. It was a very short exchange, like a teacher correcting a student, and it certainly didn't put me off going there semi-regularly ever since.

So when he immediately recognized me again after so much time and knew not to even ask the question, it made me burst out laughing. "Wow, that goes back a long way!" I said.

"Well, some things make an impression," he said.

I kept smiling as he got my drink, warmed the pizza and rang the whole thing up (for a fair price, only what I wanted and nothing more, etc.). "One day," I said, "I will come back and order one of everything."

Chalk one up for my crusade to improve American customer service, and then another one for having lived here long enough to have some history with these people.