Chapter 10: Killing Time at the LCP: The Month Before The Mouse

I left Kalamazoo. My roommates were doing a bang-up job of giving me reasons for justifiable homicide, and getting the hell out of that house was the best thing I could do in order to ensure everyone's safety. I can't imagine what life would have been like if I stayed in Kalamazoo. Where would I be right now? Probably living back at home with my parents, still in debt from being convicted of criminal negligence because I accidentally burnt the house down when I made a grilled cheese drunk at 3 in the afternoon on a Wednesday. I hated my house, hated school, and hated myself. I had some good friends though. Friends that I really miss today. But I needed to escape. So I came across a flyer for the Walt Disney World College Program and a few months later, I moved to Orlando, Florida. However, I'm getting ahead of myself. This isn't about Disney. This is about the month in between Kalamazoo and Orlando.

This is a hard chapter to write. Not because I went through some sort of emotional difficulty or any type of hard time. I was not battling clinical depression and I did not have an eating disorder. Life was fine. I was a little nervous, what with the moving away all by myself coming up, but that's not why this is a hard chapter to write. The reason this isn't easy is simple:

I worked at a pizza place for a month over Christmas break.

There. Basically I just gave you all there is to know about my time at Little Caesar's Pizza. How do I create a whole chapter of it? I'll try my best to put a spin on it. Perhaps I'll make my boss a cross dresser in a wheelchair. And instead of a pizza place, it's a brothel. There! Now things are really coming along. It's a well-known rule of writing that you should never tell your audience how boring the subject matter ahead is going to be. That's just telling them to stop reading. You've probably already quit. Or you're close to it. Or you've decided to start cooking while continuing with this chapter, because you've got a lot to do today and don't have time to just sit and read.

Well, now that I've spent a good amount of paragraphs talking about things of absolutely no relevance, I guess we can begin.

I was leaving for Disney on January 28th, 2004. But I came home from WMU at the beginning of December. I felt the need to get a job at this point, to keep myself from going crazy. What would I do all day for two months besides obsess over whether or not I made the right decision, make lengthy lists of things to take to Florida that I didn't actually need, and talk to my friends back at WMU as they poured on the guilt of which I'm highly susceptible as it is. So, I set out to find a job. By pooling my various resources, I happened upon one rather quickly. Brynne, the same Brynne from Twist & Shout, happened to be working at Little Caesar's and said she could probably get me a job. Now, had we told the managers right away that I would only be working there for about a month, I doubt I would have gotten the job. But by saying that I had left school for an internship but was staying home instead not only provided a great excuse for why I left college, but also opened the door for when I did quit to go to Disney. That was Brynne's genius right there. I take no credit.

I started on Christmas Eve. That was no problem. I think I've worked on Christmas Eve almost every year since I was fourteen. Twist and Shout, Best Buy, and PacSun all had me working on Christmas Eve. It's really not that bad. My family doesn't come over until around 5:00 anyway, and most places close early on Christmas Eve, so I would be back in time regardless. Working on New Year's Eve was a little bit harder. Not only because I received drunken phone calls every fifteen minutes from one of my friends asking why I didn't go back to Kalamazoo that night, but also because the guy I was working with was socially awkward and just plain weird. It was not a night to remember.

Work was easy. Make pizza. Sell pizza. Make more pizza. Sell it. Make one to eat. Eat it. The best part of the day was when we would lay pizza boxes on the ground (because the ground was nasty) and sleep on them. The worst part was when I had to be there at 7am to make like 100 pizzas which had to be taken to the local elementary schools. You know how on pizza day every slice always had three pepperonis on it? That was no happy accident. Three very tired, possibly hungover, and extremely lazy underachievers had to get up when it was still dark out just to do that.

So time stood still for about a month while I worked at Little Caesar's. Aside from work, life wasn't bad. We took a lot of trips to Canada and drank a lot. That always passes the time. A little less than a week before I moved to Florida, I finally told the boss I was quitting. Well, I left him a note. I never liked confrontation when it comes to quitting jobs. But I did do the very responsible thing of coming in after he left the next day to ask Brynne if he read it. See? It's important to be mature when working in a professional atmosphere.

And that was Little Caesar's.