Title: “Box Folding Challenge”

General Information about Item:

• Verbal Lore, Domino’s Lore
• Language: English
• Country of Origin: United States
• Informant: Angel Trejo 
• Date Collected: 11-10-19
• Location Collected: Oro Valley, AZ

Informant Data:

Angel Trejo is a restaurant worker in Tucson, AZ.  He was born and raised in Tucson, AZ, and graduated Canyon Del Oro High School in 1999. During his time in high school, he worked at Domino’s Pizza for three years as a delivery driver and pizza line cook.

Contextual Data:

Like every fast food chain, Domino’s prides itself on its quick and quality service. Anything that can be done in order to speed up the process of making and delivering pizzas is key to each individual chain’s success. For the chain that Angel worked at, in order to make the monotonous job of folding pizza boxes fun, they would time and challenge each other. It would be a friendly competition that would both complete the task of folding pizza boxes and pass the time by when business was slow.

Item:

In the back of the kitchen there was a box folding room with tons of pre-folded boxes. The stacks of already folded boxes would touch from floor to ceiling. Folding more boxes was a side job to complete when things were slow in the store. During the slower hours, Angel and his coworkers would go back there and see how fast they could fold the 25 unfolded boxes that came in a package. Working with one partner, you would have to tear the plastic wrap holding the 25 unfolded boxes together and then proceed to fold the 25 boxes. The fastest time won. This competition was used to determine who would go home early or not have to do a certain job some days.

Interpretation: 

By making a friendly competition out of folding pizza boxes, Angel and his coworkers were able to come closer as a work force. Introducing this little bit of competition would make the coworkers excited about completing the monotonous task of folding boxes and entertain them when few orders were being called in.

Collectors Information: 

Names: Christian Trejo

University Name: Dartmouth College

Course’s Title: Russian 13

Instructor’s Name: Professor Victoria Somoff

Term and year: Fall 2019