Well, it was nice while it lasted.
Ogre quit his corporate job. All his high-talk about being able to “handle it” came crashing down around him — one of the problems with working at the franchise is that it slows you down, makes you unable to adjust to a higher volume store. Personally, I think Ogre has some problems which inhibit his ability to handle a certain work load, notably, the certain work load that the franchise store had.
(Currently, my biggest issue with the franchise is this kid “Ron Weasely” who runs the Sunday dayshift and throws a fit whenever more than one pizza is ordered. On a busy summer Sunday we might have twenty pizzas ordered between opening and five o’clock … I remember Hampden where on a slow Sunday we did fifteen pizzas an hour).
The franchise isn’t a busy store. I say this to be kind. Slacker corporate managers generally like to seek out stores like the franchise — a rural area with a small customer base. There are no apartment buildings in the franchise’s delivery area, no townhomes either. There are a grand total of four gas stations and four traffic lights in a delivery area which is roughly the size of Baltimore City. The area stretches between Baltimore and Harford Counties. A Friday night dinner rush can be handled with four to five drivers. The store does not do more than nine-thousand in sales in a typical week.
It is a very, very slow store.
Somehow, Ogre believed that even though he wasn’t able to handle this franchise, with its low volume and easy goin’ ways, he would somehow be better off with corporate. I guess, to him, it was about a fresh chance. But he got what he had here — well, more of it. He was hired as a bonafide manager by corporate (no idea how that happened), and expected to act like someone who’d been doing that for as long as he’d been bumbling about our shop. But Ogre always sort of filled the “warm body” requirement — glorified insider is a generous way of describing his duties. And at the corporate store there was no Greg to intervene on his behalf — he was his usual, cheerful, oblivious self tonight. Showed up, out of uniform, unemployed, jumped on the make-line right away, hung around for a few hours. He got a pizza out of the deal (Greg can be such a cheap-ass).
Greg didn’t make any official announcement about hiring him back. Ogre put in applications at Best Buy and CompUSA, and I think that’s good. He seems to know a lot about computers, and I think he’d be good at determining what type of hardware or software a person might be looking for with a computer system. He’s just got no ability to make snap-judgements or to delegate and, to get him to make a pizza in under five minutes, you really sort of have to light a fire under his ass (literally).
G’luck Ogre.