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

General Information about Item:

• Verbal Lore, Domino’s Lore
• Language: English
• Country of Origin: United States
• Informant: Angel Trejo
• Date Collected: 10-31-19
• Location Collected: Oro Valley, Arizona

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. With this in mind, the workers have to make pizzas to what the customer wants. This story  would be shared every time the infamous anchovy-loving customer placed his order.

Item: A frequent customer would regularly order anchovy pizza from Domino’s. No one wanted to mess with the anchovies while preparing and cooking the pizza due to their gross smell. The customer would complain that there were not enough anchovies in the pizza, so as a prank, the pizza line cooks poured the anchovy juice on the uncooked pizza, cooked the pizza with the juice and the fish, and then topped it off with more anchovy juice. The customer called back to say it was the best pizza he had ever ordered. It is still frequently lamented by the drivers as they hated delivering this pizza because the stench of the anchovy juice and anchovies would stink up the delivery driver’s car.

Interpretation: 

What was meant to be a joke actually became a regular order and tradition for this specific customer. This story shows how one customer’s order can arise emotions and opinions out of all the workers in the store at the time of the making of the pizza.

Collectors Information:

Names: Christian Trejo

College Name: Dartmouth College

Course Title: Russian 13

Instructor’s Name: Professor Somoff

Term and year: Fall 2019