The Top 40

I remember about 20 years ago, the Buggering Frugal Gourmet had a series/cookbook on the origins of pizza. While he was rogering the staff, he made some exquisite flat breads with olive oil, garlic and pine nuts on them. He pretended they were pizzas, and that the boys enjoyed themselves.

There's only four things we do better than
anyone else

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were
a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's
report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on
his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no
cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie
in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a
class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich
and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than
twenty-one minutes.
Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it:
homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and
job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their
Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can't you guys tell
time?
Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed industry.
People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its
doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South
Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And
they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time
disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating
tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures
employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had
decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all
that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude
themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no,
they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever,
it was fucking inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people's houses, gave
them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs,
studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn
queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling,
mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a
Jesuit couldn't respond without committing a venial sin.
The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human
nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix:
smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a
little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade
imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are
chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind
the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a
computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of
the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his
phone number and poured into the smart box's built-in RAM. From there it is
communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up
display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the
Deliverator does not even have to glance down.
If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to
CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself -- the
Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight
razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator's nightmares, the Capo and prime
figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated -- who will be on the phone to the
customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo will
land on the customer's yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him
a free trip to Italy -- all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a
public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private
life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow,
be owes the Mafia a favor.

Working hard for peanuts; delivering pizza to a group of women in an office. They wait until you arrive to start collecting money, they argue about how much is their share since one was just going to have half a bite and tip is in coins.