As anyone who is self employed will tell you, there are times when you are flush and times when you have to tighten your belt and look after the pennies. If ever my design customers dropped me and I found myself a bit short of cash, I have another possibility to fall back on… Pizza!

You see my home phone number is very similar to a local pizza take out place. I get a fair number of calls from people ordering all sorts of pizzas. I probably don’t get enough calls to open ‘Simon’s Pizza House’, but I could perhaps offer to take the order for the actual pizza place on a commission basis. Well heck, when times get hard, you gotta do what you gotta do, right!

The problem is worst at the weekends. Drunk scouser lads and ladettes call me and slur something like “Can-I-ave-a-cheese.. cheese… cheese…. [long pause]… cheese and tomato one please mate. 23 Mountwood Drive… oh and hey, joodoo beer like?”

I used to tell them they had dialed the wrong number, sometimes I’d even give them the right number. But I have stopped doing this as the callers would usually just hang up on me without so much as word of thanks.

Recently though I have invented a new way of amusing myself when I get such a call. If the person sounds drunk, stupid or, as is common around these parts, both, I actually take their order. When asked how long it will be until I can deliver it I say something like “I can get to you on Wednesday at 8pm, is that alright for you?”. Other times I simply refuse to deliver the pizza on the grounds that they live in a “high risk area” and its just too dangerous for me to send a driver there. This always gets them very angry indeed!

Sometimes I let them tell me what toppings they want only to inform them that… [Click here to continue reading this article at ‘Meanwhile’]