Some People Would Still Prefer Broken Glass To Pineapple

When I am sixteen, I work in a pizza place in the midwest, where tornadoes tend to happen. It’s mid-morning and the initial rush has petered out. We just have one customer and he’s waiting for a pizza he ordered.

A freak storm blows up. It starts to rain, and quickly moves to rain and hail. The winds start going crazy outside, and the rain is pouring down along with some quarter-size hail. We’re basically looking at weather that goes to funnel clouds very easily. It happens very quickly; it is starting to rain when our customer walked in the door, we build his pizza from scratch, and it’s in the oven. It’s been less than fifteen minutes.

One of my delivery drivers is in the back and he calls to me, with the phone pressed to his face, to say our other pizza driver has been forced to take shelter. He tells us it looked like a funnel cloud was forming and it had blown past them and was heading in our direction. I go back to thank the driver for the info, and to tell the driver to stay safe and come back when he can and not to rush.

As this is being relayed back and forth, there’s a massive crash and the sound of breaking glass. Our general manager comes running out of her office yelling and cursing, thinking someone in the store just destroyed something.

I come running out of the back because the whole building shook and I realize, “Oh, my God, there was a customer out there!”

Our marquee has been ripped off the building and chucked through our front window like a battering ram. It snapped in half so that half of it is in the lobby; the other half cleared the counter and came into the area where we cook and prepare food. If I hadn’t gone back to talk to my delivery driver, there was a real chance I would have been hit by the thing.

The poor customer in the lobby had hit the floor and covered his head with his hands. He comes up slowly, shedding pieces of glass, and turns around to stare at this huge metal thing that missed him by about a foot. The customer is okay; none of the glass has actually cut him.

Our general manager yells at him — over howling wind, rain, and bouncing golf-ball-sized hail that’s now playing pinball in our lobby — to get behind the counter with the rest of us, and rushes us all to the walk-in cooler. We wait in the cooler for about 30 minutes for the noise to drop before coming out.

Our power is dead, but we make our customer a new pizza with fresh ingredients — the one in the oven, plus the ingredients we’d had out in the prepping station, are scrapped on the off-chance that they have gotten glass in them — free of charge and give him directions for cooking it at home.

Our general manager runs off to call corporate to let them know the store is closed due to our sign sitting in the front lobby. Corporate wants to know why we can’t just sweep up the lobby and continue business. Our general manager tells them that we have no power and it is a safety issue to allow customers to climb through a shattered storefront for food that we can’t cook anyway.

In the end, only the threat of possible customer injury makes corporate — begrudgingly — agree that closing the store is the best option.