How I Think

Recently, people have been asking me how I can possibly have some of the opinions I do. Where most political issues come up I tend to be in the middle. I view both sides as having valuable input and think if we look at the problem just a little bit differently we might notice a couple of inconsistencies in the overall narrative we’re getting from the various media outlets.

I don’t typically enjoy talking about politics anymore because people have become so invested in how they think that by offering even a slightly different opinion it seems to outrage them to a point of frustration. There was one day where I had been engaged in a couple of debates on a single political issue. During the day I was called both a horrible liberal extremist and an overzealous conservative fascist. Which was interesting because I didn’t change my opinion from one debate to the other; I only changed the people I was talking to.

I’ve been trying to look for a way to explain the way I think to people for a while and I wanted to use a news story that was as innocent as possible. I think I found that story. A little while ago a young man tweeted to Dominos Pizza that the pizza he received was completely bare; no sauce, cheese, or toppings there was only crust. Dominos responded however by that time he’d figured out he opened the pizza upside down. Almost everybody had a great laugh. Some people thought how funny it was that this poor fool did this; ruined his pizza. How stupid was he that he opened his pizza upside down. Some people have even accused the young man of pranking Dominos, the scamp.

In order to show my thought process I’m going to work off the basis that this was not a prank. This means he did open his pizza upside down. Which means one three things had to happen. One, he turned the pizza upside down before opening it. Two, the driver gave it to him upside down. Three, the pizza was put in the box upside down. Now let’s look at each of these individually.

First scenario, he flipped the pizza. This is a possibility, except there are a few things that would make this a bit of a challenge. The driver would hand him the pizza upright and he would have had to turn it over on the way to the table and why would any one do that? To be fair he could have been stoned, even still it seems unlikely they would flip the pizza on their way t the table. There’s the added problem of the box, check out a Dominos pizza box, they aren’t designed to be opened upside down, and it would be difficult to pop the tabs on the box that way around. Additionally, there is decoration on the bottom of the box that clearly informs you the pizza is upside down. It seems it would be really hard to open one of these upside down and not notice you had flipped the box. To me this seems unlikely.

Second scenario, the driver gave it to him upside down. While slightly more likely as it does remove the he flipped the box between the door and the table. It’s possible the driver had to slam on the breaks and the warming bag slid off the car seat and flipped over the driver didn’t know which side was up when he grabbed it off the floor of his car and delivered the pizza upside down as an accident. Or they did it on purpose. I have known several pizza delivery drivers over the years and they all have dozens of stories about how they messed with customers who were difficult, didn’t tip, or didn’t tip enough by their standards; I’m not saying it’s right just that they did. We then hit the problem of the bottom of the box. One of them is sure to notice the box is upside down at this point. Maybe the driver didn’t want to say anything because they hoped the customer didn’t notice. Once again this seems unlikely, because of the box.

Our final scenario, they put the pizza in the box upside down. This could happen, especially if you have a new employee, the place has a large number of orders and they are in a hurry to get them all out the door, or they have some grudge against the customer, as I explained earlier. If they put the pizza in the box upside at the restaurant it would avoid the problem of the bottom of the box. It would also be unlikely to get noticed by the customer after they opened the box depending on how they closed the box once they were finished. To me, this is the most likely scenario. In my opinion Dominos owes that man a pizza because the employees at that location screwed up.

That’s how I think. I look at a story and wonder about these things. To be clear, I choose this story because it is fairly innocent. I wanted a news story that people would be familiar with and that I could point to with some accuracy. I also wanted to pick a story that wasn’t politically motivated. It is my hope that you read this and got a couple of chuckles out of this and you may even read the news a little closer in the future. Since this is a story about pizza and not gun control, deficit spending, or any of the other myriad political pieces in the world I think I have a better chance of that.

As for me, I’m off to carry out a pizza for some reason I’ve been craving one for the past few minutes.


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