A Supreme Apology

On busy days, my boss has me call in pizza for the entire office. That’s about 300 or so people. The pizza shops in the area are generally super considerate and work with me to get the pizza delivered and/or in stages, so even if I only have an hour’s notice, we can start serving on time. This round, we order cheese, pepperoni, and supreme, though the supreme is only ten pies — about a quarter of the numbers the other two have.

As we get serving, I’m called away briefly, and when I get back, my coworker says that none of the supreme pizzas were delivered. At this point, I’m too tired and frazzled to doubt him, especially when three other people back him up, so I take ten of the pizzas back and explain the situation to the employees there.

One employee says he’s absolutely sure he made those ten supremes and that I must be mistaken, which I deny and explain that all my coworkers who were serving confirmed. We go back and forth for a couple of minutes before the employee offers to call his manager. Once off the phone, he tells me his manager will be in tomorrow and will be able to process a partial refund, which was all I wanted since the other pizzas were fine.

The next day, as I’m walking to my desk, I notice something: a plate with pizza leftover from yesterday, and it’s definitely not just cheese or pepperoni. I ask my coworker about it, and she tells me one of the servers gave it to her yesterday. The same one who told me we didn’t get any supreme whatsoever.

I talk to the coworker who was serving the day before, and he explains that he and the others thought it would be funny to play a joke on me. I’m royally ticked off at this point because I had to make an extra trip out to the pizza place to return the pizza, I was going to have to make another that day for the refund, I was stressed about the order being wrong, I stressed out the poor employees who had been kind enough to get all these pizzas for us on an hour’s notice, and I undoubtedly sounded like one of those people NAR loves to make fun of.

In the end, I swallowed my pride and went back to the pizza shop to apologize and explain what happened instead of getting a refund. If I could’ve, I would have dragged every employee who lied to me by the ear to that shop to apologize, as well.