I was never cut out to be a good waiter. So while I’ve had a number of different jobs, only one of them involved taking orders by hand and picking up tips.

Like I said before, I followed a decent manager from a fast food job to a somewhat slower food job. The Pizza Hut was about a half a mile from the Burger King, situated right on the busy intersection of Highway 27 and Battlefield Parkway. (Practically every street in my hometown refers to the nearby Chickamauga National Battlefield, the Parkway being only the most obvious.) Next door to the Pizza Hut was a Wendy’s. It’s still there. The building that housed the Pizza Hut remains as well, but it is now a Mexican restaurant.

Waiting at the Hut was better than working for the King for a number of reasons. For one, the pizza business involves a lot less grease. For another, there were far fewer dreaded tasks at closing. Give me a half-hour of vacuuming the floor or stretching cling film over the salad bar leftovers any day. Better that than scraping thawed-then-refrozen meat bits from the bottom of a burger cooler.

On afternoons when the Hut wasn’t so busy, we of the wait staff had only to keep the wait station relatively clean, make sure there were always bread sticks in the warmer and marinara in the heated dispenser. We were allowed the luxury of munching on the occasional chunk o’ bread stick when the convenient opportunity presented. And when lunch time rolled around, a waiter was entitled to a free Personal Pan Pizza of their own making. This meant that you could walk your own unbaked crust down the prep line in the kitchen, pile on whatever ingredients worked and place said crust onto the oven conveyor thing.

Oh, yes. My second job had that in common with the first. Food cooked while journeying through a gigantic, stainless steel box. Only the Pizza Hut oven was about three times the size of the BK broiler.

An interesting bit of trivia. Do you remember the Pizza Hut Priazzo? That was the big, new dish when I worked there. It was a pizza pie, literally. Crust like a pie shell, filled with ingredients and cheese, then another sheet of dough blanketed over that. And to solve the problem of how to ensure that all of those inner bits were cooked, the cooks would take this thing that looked like a spiraling cast iron comb and stick the teeth into the top layer of dough. This would conduct the heat into the Priazzo and give it this signature pattern when removed at the end. Neat, eh?

The only problem with the free Personal Pan Lunch was that I was a soft drink snob. Actually, I still am. Pizza Hut was a Pepsico property and as such they served only Pepsi products. So I would bake my Personal Pan, then walk next door to Wendy’s, where I would order a large Coca-Cola to wash it down. To split the difference, I would sit on the parking lot curb between the two to have my meal.

I made decent enough tips for kid in high school. Then as now, you had to enter your tips into the computer at the end of your shift. In theory, the sum of our rather paltry hourly pay ($2.10, I think) plus the hourly average of our tips would pass minimum wage muster. And as reported, it did. Barely. As actual, I don’t think anyone ever reported all of their tip take.

The tables you wanted to take for tips were the worst to clean up. Softball and baseball teams. Coaches would pay, which would be an accounting nightmare. But as everyone gathered up to leave, the adults would never confer to determine just who would leave a cash tip. Often, you’d end up with duplicate tips from any coach or assistant coach who felt the least bit obligated.

Some tips were just odd. An aspiring gospel singer came in for lunch with her grandmother. A teenager most likely in junior high, she left me her demo tape. Can’t remember if I listened to it or not. Her name? Britney Spears.

(No.)

Here’s the weirdest story. One night late in the summer, I served a couple at a table. Dark-haired, both of them, I would guess they were Cuban by way of Florida. Actually, I’ll just come out and say what I thought at the time. The guy looked like Tony Montana. And he called his knife and fork his “little friends.”

(No. He didn’t.)

But what he did say was more interesting. He and his date finished their meal, got up to leave and left an okay tip. But on the way out, he got my attention. I walked over and he asked me, quite vaguely, if I would do him a favor. Through my over-sized glasses — thank you, late ’80s — I’m sure I blinked and gathered enough of my young Methodist courtesy to say, “Excuse me?” He repeated himself. He asked if I had a car and wondered if I could do him a favor, presumably involving said car. I remained polite in my state of subtle Stranger Danger and said something like, “Oh, yeah, well … I’m closing today, sir, so I’m going to be here until at least midnight or so, so you know …” He took this new bit of information in stride, said that he would’ve paid me for my trouble, then just nodded and stepped out the door to his waiting companion.

Anyone care to guess what happen’d around midnight? Just before we closed, Not Tony Montana returned, dateless. This time, he was more insistent, telling me that he really needed to borrow my car. Why? Because he had to go downtown (Chattanooga) to get some things, to (and I quote) “pick up some tools.” If I’d just let him borrow my car, my not-so-prized 1976 Ford Grenada, he would give me $100. If I wanted, he said, I could even come along for the trip.

This time, I managed to channel some of my Dad’s deep well of resolve where bad ideas are concerned. $100 would’ve been a nice bit of change for the 16-year-old me, but there was no way I was going to let anyone drive my car, much less somebody I didn’t know. And I wasn’t about to hop into my own car with someone who just needed to get some “tools.” So eventually, Not Tony Montana left. Disappointed and maybe a little more than pissed off. In his own car.

And yes, I still wonder why he needed my car. Tools? TOOLS?!?

Pizza Hut was my second and last hometown job in good old Fort Oglethorpe. After that, I left for college in Athens.

Athens, Tennessee.

This post was inspired by Rusty’s meme-establishing “Jobs I’ve Had” series, a trend also followed by Garrett and Sara and Nikki!