I looked at my boss, with heat through my chest like a pot on the verge of boiling over and an internal deep breath and said “You’re right. I didn’t think of it that way. My mistake.” And I walked away to finish the day’s work. 

In my experience most people think the best way to solve most problems is more. More hard work, different ways around the problem, a better mindset. Harder, better, faster, stronger. I don’t think that’s always true, though, and like the computer at the end of War Games, maybe instead we should become better at giving up.

I had been working at Little Caesars for 8 months by then, which most people would consider a relatively short duration, but in my barely 17 years of life experience it was a good chunk of my life spent there, especially compared to the barely 3 months spent at my first job. 

I stayed so long because it was the first job I learned to love. After working for a family owned pizza shop with very serious coworkers, the more casual environment at LC’s was a welcome change. Sure, there was the occasional annoyance, like the guy who waits until after paying to tell you he doesn’t have time to wait, but overall I didn’t mind the work, and loved the people I worked with.

 I remember several times where I was putting on toppings with my coworkers, talking about completely random things, everything from where the cheese was made to the cause of societal norms, and making the realization that I enjoyed coming to work.

I was good at it too, as many customers had complimented both my pizza making and customer service/problem solving skills, and to this day I am still proud of it. I was even going to  be promoted to assistant manager, but I was ineligible when they remembered I was a minor. 

Unfortunately, this “golden age” of fast food pizza making came to a close when our new manager and his new favorite employee were hired. 

I could handle Perry’s micromanaging, passive aggression, and narcissism, but Carmilla was a whole different kind of difficult. Everything Perry wanted, she would make sure we did twice over, even when it was nonsensical. If Perry wanted the store windows cleaned, we would either have to stay an hour and a half past closing to do it or abandon the waiting customers to fulfill the cosmetic perfection expected from us.

At one point, I was talking, apparently a little too loudly about whether Perry’s pizza cost cutting measures would work out in the long run (spoiler alert, they wouldn’t) and she pulled me aside to facilitate a conversation directly between me and Perry where I was basically told “I’m the boss, that’s why we’re putting less ingredients that what corporate says”, which is about what I expected. 

I could even live with that (it is a job after all) but what did bother me was the 1-2 punch of Carmillia not knowing how to do her job and the narcissism preventing her from learning. Whenever I was at the register, I had to explain to a customer why a pizza wasn’t done, without saying it was because Carmillia refuses to use the ticket system established, and was too proud to make missed pizzas because she “doesn’t make mistakes”. 

This is something that is too common in entry level work, and I think everyone has a story about a bad manager to tell. It’s ironic too, because all of the jobs that expect you to problem solve, maintain professionalism, etc, have managers that don’t follow those same guidelines. And that also explains why all the good employees quit only a few months in.

And that’s exactly what I did one day. Carmillia had left landing (where pizzas are taken out of the oven and boxed) unattended and was scolding me for not being there, despite her giving no indication that she had decided to switch roles. As the anger rose through my body, I let it pass, made up an apology, and decided at that moment that I was done.

Thinking back, I did the best I could. I had tried repeatedly to work with her and Perry for solutions that work for everybody but had been repeatedly shut out and told that if I wasn’t happy with a part of the job, I should quit. So I did.

Of course, I didn’t tell them any of this, and to this day they still think I left to pursue a lifelong career cleaning windows. I don’t care though, because I maintained professionalism and left on good terms overall, and learned an important lesson: you can’t fix everything.