Pizzas and kids

I like kids, I really do. However, today was the dreaded, Bring Your Kid To Work day aka, the day where Ruby turns into an unofficial babysitter and somehow manages to not kill your children. Last year, two lovely children
decided it would be fun to go down the elevator, run into the lobby, have me "buzz them in" (because lets face it, their parents don't even have their pass to give them), run up the stairs, go back down the elevator and repeat. Joy.

So today, I went into work prepared for the battle. I thought it would be a good day when I got offered 2 munchkins from a little girl. I mean, that is a pretty awesome. But the day just went downhill from there.

Kathy is out this week, so I am in charge of her job since I'm her "assistant" for a couple hour a couple days a week. Kathy manages all meetings and conferences that take place in the corporate office and arranging all food deliveries for them. How hard would it be to do that while she was gone? Apparently really hard. Doing someone's full time job, on top of my job, wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.

Of course, today there were 3 lunches coming in. Two of them were huge orders, one for all the lil kiddies and one for 25 people. Kathy and I thought we were being smart last week when we were reviewing the upcoming meetings, and ordering from the same pizza place for both meetings. I mean, one pizza place, one delivery, easy right? NOPE!


Of course, since we had such a large order (we're talking about 15 pizzas and 4 bulk salads), it was late and the lobby was quickly filling up with hungry little tummies. Finally, the order arrives and this is where I realize ordering in bulk wasn't the smartest idea. When I placed the order on Wednesday, I specified two different orders so I could be charged appropriately. Yeah, well most pizza places don't care that certain pizzas are going to different conference rooms. Bill and I were trying to divide up all the pizzas, all while trying to get the kids and HR rep "in charge" of the kids to leave us the hell alone.

Once the pizzas were sorted, we realized that of course, we were short two pizzas. No problem, I'll call them up, the kiddos will be fine, at least they have 10 pizzas to hold them over.

Once that order was placed, Graham the "host" of the other meeting comes down to question what Kathy and I had done. There were 30 people in his meeting, not 25 and he was freaking out that there wouldn't be enough food.

Are you serious?? The 5 pizzas won't be enough??

Kathy and I do a little trick where we "cut" orders by 80% so we don't have left overs and/or waste food. So, a quick math lesson: 25people x 80% = 20 people. Assume 2 slices per person, that's 40 slices. Each pie has 8 slices, so 40/8=5. Ta-dahhhh 5 pizzas. So instead of explaining this logic to this guy since he's in no mood to hear it, I tell him I'll order another pizza (making it 6 total, since using my previous math equation would be enough pizza for 30 people.)

Nope!

The guy orders 5 more pizzas. That's a total of 10 pizzas for 30 people! And the place we're ordering from isn't cheap. So in order to get back to my own job, I don't argue the math and just order his pizzas. It was that moment that the delivery guy showed up with the forgotten 2 pizzas from the other order. Only he brought 4 because, well, I'm not sure why. So now the kids have 14 pizzas and I just placd an order for an additional 5.

I asked Bill what I should do, if I should take 2 of the pizzas that just arrived and give them to Graham. We reached the conclusion that it'd be easier for me to the leave 4 pizzas for the kids and not have to cancel any of Graham's order.

As if God knew I was freaking out, clock struck 1pm and it was time for my lunch. Since I have someone cover my lunches and they were standing there, instead of waiting for the other order to arrive, I took it as a sign to get the heck out of reception and take a breather at lunch.


29 minutes later as I'm walking back to my desk, I swing by both conference rooms. I have NEVER seen so much pizza. There were boxes everywhere!! Both rooms the food gets set up outside of the conference room, so I walked over and flipped the lids.

Full boxes of pizzas.



Now, what makes this story even more interesting is that Graham is the Controller for the company. He should theoretically be good at math. Please explain to me how he thought ordering all this extra food was a good idea.

In the end, the whole company lucked by by getting "free" lunch. I sure hope Graham enjoys his $380 lunch he just cost the company.