Hey up! How have you been? Yeah same. Do you have any idea whats going on right now? Me neither.
ANYWAY my shrimpy misery last time was so well received and seemed to cheer people up so I decided to delve even further into my eclectic CV. The timing is actually perfect as I recently forced my quarantine buddies (boyfriend Ben and housemates Sam and Martha) to watch my favourite documentary ever.
Making a Murderer? Move over Stephen Avery. The Keepers? Never heard of ’em. Tiger King? Carole Baskin found deceased (only a matter of time, surely?) Screw the rest; A Slice of Life is, in my opinion, the best 46 minutes and 42 seconds I have ever experienced.
It is a glimpse into the truly fascinating world of the cheesy juggernaut that is Domino’s Pizza. A gargantuan entity, originated in the US in 1960, Domino’s is a multinational pizza restaurant chain that you would only be able to miss if you have lived under a rock for the past few decades. Along with rivals Papa John’s and Pizza Hut, Domino’s undoubtedly dominates (geddit) the takeaway pizza sector in the UK.
And, at the age of 18, it was my first ever job.
A Slice of Life, originally produced by Channel 4 and still available on YouTube, is so absurd that you would think that it is way more on the mockumentary side of the spectrum as opposed to the real thing. In case you haven’t seen it, I will catch you up.
Die hard Domino’s employees are branded ‘Dominoids’. The most loyal of which find themselves nominated for the coveted ‘Manager of the Year’ accolade at the highly anticipated company awards ceremony – held in what looks like Wembley bloody Stadium every year – complete with glittery backdrop and disco lights.
The same level glamour and budget goes to the annual fastest pizza making competition held in their mecca, Milton Keynes. Will immigrant driver Zagros take the title for the second year running? Will he fix his prize spoodle before the competition starts? You’ll have to watch to find out.
We then meet Eddie El Llamaa, Domino’s answer to David Brent. An ex-delivery driver who is living out his dream after his parent’s remortgaged their house to give Eddie the money he needed to become a franchisee (that’s a big thing in Dominos… anyone can buy their own store. Anyone who has a cool quarter of a mil lying around that is) but Eddie truly broke that glass ceiling and is a Dominos Pizza success story. He kindly gives us a tour of his office to his empire; both parents sitting silently at laptops, slightly perturbed at the sight of the camera crew. A printed out picture of a castle is stuck on the wall with the words ‘EDDIE’S GOAL TO BUY THIS CASTLE.’
‘Being a Domino’s Pizza franchisee… you know, there’s great perks. You can hire whoever you want. So I hired one of the sexiest, you know, PA’s on the planet. So this is, errr *hand on her knee* my err personal assistant and er, I married her! Only joking *laughs* so, err… no, this is my wife.’
Eddie El Lamaa and his wife. No, his PA. Both?
Is she his wife being she was his PA or the other way round? It’s unclear.
We then meet Danny Dominoid. Danny Dominoid is the company mascot. Only the truly favoured are asked to enter the suit (Louie the Shrimp… sensing a pattern here?) the reason being that, from the moment you step into Danny’s sweaty interior, you transform into a company ambassador, representing the red, white and blue. Let me tell you, Domino’s don’t fuck around when it comes to Danny. Compared to Bubba Gump’s, where I was allowed to roam free and twerk on the streets of Piccadilly, I didn’t even get a look in when it came to their dead eyed prodigal son.
In A Slice of Life, we meet 16 year old Jacob, the poor unwitting soul shoved inside this particular fleshy hellsuit. He explains, whilst advertising a company raffle outside Rotherham football stadium, that there isn’t much work in his hometown, before being booed away by football fans thinking (due to his blue uniform) that he was in fact a mascot for rival team, Millwall.
Jacob, 16, explains that work is scarce in his hometown before being heckled by angry Rotherham fans because is wearing blue, not red.
Long story short, it’s fucking amazing. You need to watch it immediately. But as I mentioned earlier, I may have more of a vested interest seeing as I, myself, in the past could have been described as a Dominoid. You cut me open and I would bleed tomato sauce. Before Shrimptown, before Beefland, was Dominos, the OG. My first proper job and 2 and a half years of stories that yet again nobody really believed were real. Until I discovered a Slice of Life, that is.
I was hired as a delivery driver straight out of school in my local Hertfordshire Bishop’s Stortford branch. More money than I had ever earned before and an excuse to race about town in my tiny red Ford Ka. You could spot me from a mile off, doing handbrake turns around the Tesco’s roundabout and my long ponytail swinging out the back of my red and blue baseball cap as I strutted up your drive, about to make your Friday night in that much more exciting. With Pizza, that is.
On a summer’s night, it was heaven. Windows down, music blaring, a couple of deliveries in the back ready to drop off. I was the only female driver at the time so (and not exactly the most feminist thing ever but hey, I don’t make the rules) I got a shit load of tips. So much so that I never touched my wages, and lived off the cash I brought back at the end of the night. You would be glad to pick up a cheeky 6-9pm shift to get a few extra quid and you got home whilst it was still light.
In the winter, it was pretty miserable. My tiny 1.3 litre struggled to keep steady on the slushy tarmac and everything took so much longer because of the danger of black ice. The night’s got dark at 4pm so you would spend your evening slowly trawling down pitch black country roads, squinting at your delivery ticket. ‘Number three, the house with the flag in the bush. Not long after the garage. If you hit the sign for the M11 you’ve gone too far.’
You would be looking for number 26 when the road stops at 20 and the prank deliveries became all the more annoying. However, the tips were still great and I relied on them to help me get to New Zealand, the whole reason why I got the job in the first place. I started to notice that the council estates gave you an extra fiver when the gated communities asked for their 2p change back.
My closest companions when I was first hired were the other drivers. There was the Polish father of 2 Krzysztof, 6ft tall with the strength of an Ox. He would work all hours of the day and any extra cash he had, he would send back to his family in Poland. It was at a time where the Polish were not deemed welcome (in Britain? Never.) So I was all the more protective of him when a drunken racist waiting for his Mighty Meaty would slur at him over the counter.
Kirk was another delivery legend. Scottish born and pushing 60, Kirk would bound in store (always in shorts no matter the weather) and spring back out again within seconds. He ran a few marathons a year and was the fittest person I have probably ever met. A cheery greeting you only really caught 60% of became the expected of Kirk. I still think about him alot.
Adrian was my best mate at the time. Despite our 20 year odd age gap, we bonded over my upcoming trip to New Zealand and he became my closest confidante. He loved a moan, did Adrian, and I enjoyed winding him up even further. The familiar DING DONG of the back door went off, usually signalling a driver was back from their delivery, and he would storm in; ‘That Manuden address is a bloody nightmare. It’s a dirt track! That’s all it is! I rang the bloke 3 times and no answer. Just as I’m turning around he comes running out. A joke. Olivia, write that one down for the future, it’s a nightmare to find, don’t get caught out like I did.’ When I go home nowadays and order pizza, 8 years later, I still see him bounding up my drive. He still remembers my address and persuades the other drivers to let him take the order so we can catch up.
When Lucy started, a bright and bubbly girl my age with an infectious laugh, I was grateful for some female company on the roads. We used to secretly accompany each other on our deliveries and eat sweets hidden in the back whilst the other was at the door. We would complain about our hat hair and scream with laughter at how miserable it was delivering pizza in the snow when the only coat we were allowed to wear was the branded coat provided that was so big it may as well have been a blue and red sleeping bag.
There were many more characters. Rory, the tattoo covered ‘Slapper’ (person who stretches and spins the dough, which was truly back breaking work) who was one of the franchises longest serving employees. He ended up moving into the flat above the kitchen. We used to wind him up saying when he dies he will be buried under the walk in fridge. Ant, Rowan, Ed, Matt and many more made up the first ‘work family’ I ever had. Not long after, my brother Tom and our best friend Luke also joined the team.
Tom and I volunteered to be our stores mascots (Danny was pre-disposed) for the town’s carnival in the costumes below. We took great joy in chest bumping each other and throwing Garlic and Herb sauces into the adoring crowd. My mum still to this day, without any sense of irony, says she has never been prouder of us.
Bishops Stortford carnival 2012, the start of my love of being a company mascot, evidently.
Our kitchen was not very big. Inside on a typical evening you would squeeze upwards of 25 people inside, all doing different jobs with the same goal. Drivers waiting to go on delivery would be assembling pizza boxes. One slapper would be spinning the dough in the air and shouting to the drivers for a ‘tray of LARGE please’. 3 terrified GCSE students looking for a bit of money would be stationed at the phones, taking orders and apologising for delays. Two more were in the back, washing up sauce tubs and scrubbing oven trays.
The managers would optimise the Makeline by squeezing the smaller female employees in a line, optimising the little space they had. One for sauce and cheese, one for pepperoni and sausage, one for onion and peppers, one for anything else and one for sides. On busier shifts there was sometimes even a person whose sole purpose was the load things into the oven. It was the unwritten rule that your position on the makeline dictated the pecking order. Each shift you would be greeted by the whiteboard determining your fate for the evening. You could go from ML4 all the way up to sauce and cheese within a year. Not easy, but doable.
There would be two of the quickest employees on Cut. This is where Luke found his purpose. The oven often had no barriers on the end so if you weren’t quick enough, those pizzas were on the floor. Blistering heat accompanied this pressure and it often got the best of people. An infamous anecdote that Luke still never fails to make me cry with laughter when he tells it was when a new starter was temporarily promoted from the phones to Cut for the night and got so flustered that he grabbed a portion of potato wedges fresh out of the oven with his bare hands and let out a high pitched scream as he launched them across the kitchen.
The manager on shift would take their place as head honcho on Route. They would assemble each order as it came together, quality checked each pizza as it came out of the oven, and directed the drivers on where they should go. On busy nights we would take two orders at a time and would come back to orders piled all the way up to the ceiling waiting to go out, all the while getting colder by the minute. They would also deal with customer complaints. A particular one that springs to mind is when a customer, as an act of revenge for putting mushrooms on their pizza, sent it back but only after having emptied the entirety of their hoover into the box for us to open later.
But my favourite story from my time at Dominos was this:
Picture the scene. It’s one of the busiest nights of the year. The Slappers are sweating and starting to lose feeling in their arms. The passive aggressive shouts from Cut that are letting the Makeline know that a huge bubble has formed on yet another pizza, rendering it useless, are being met with an array of ‘YES, okay we fucking know.’ retorts. Things are getting a little tense when the live count of the amount of pizzas left to be made tops 80 and the ’30 minute guarantee’ seems all the more impossible, when the area manager walks in, ready to do an inspection.
The manager on shift at the time, ushered me out of the door with two full bags, an instruction I was more than willing to obey. I took a deep breath of fresh air as I headed to my car, grateful to be out of the pressure cooker of the kitchen midst ill fated inspection. I skipped to the car park, pulled forward the chair of my 3 seater, slung the deliveries in the back, and sped away.
15 minutes go by and I’m speeding down the bypass, nearly at my first delivery of two. My phone is ringing – It was the manager. I turn it on loudspeaker.
‘WHASSUP BRO?‘
‘Liv… where are your deliveries?‘
I laugh. Classic Dominos banter. ‘What do you mean? They are in the back of my car.’
I can hear him trying not to laugh? Cry?
‘They are not.‘
I glance in the back. Empty.
‘…Shit.’
‘Do you want to know where they are?‘
My blood is ice cold at this point. ‘…Yes?‘
‘They are splattered all over the car park. You must have put them on your roof when you were getting in your car then proceeded to run over them.’
I nearly throw up. I had RAN OVER my deliveries.
Instead of listening to my panicked apology, he told me to get back to the store as soon as possible. I was toast. Surely? I was done. The big dog was in store and I had painted the YMCA carpark with ham and pineapple.
I walked in store, bracing myself for my fate. Before I could say a word, the manager handed me two more deliveries, told me to fuck off and smiled. They had all covered for me. I lived another day in my red, white and blue polyester ensemble.
There were many other stories I could have told you about the inner workings Dominos but I don’t wanna get sued. But you should know a few things:
1) It is INCREDIBLY clean.
2) The dough in the walk in fridge smells so good I used to literally hide in there and sniff it like glue.
3) I have read the calorie book. It’s not good. I will spare you the details. But to be honest, it’s lockdown so fill your boots. No guilt here.
I have already touched on this in my Bubba Gumps blog but Dominos is another example of not only the ‘company-turn-cult’ attitude that many big US brands have, but also showing me what hard work really was at a young age. Scrubbing floors, being on your feet for 9 hours in a boiling hot kitchen, being screamed at by customers who had the wrong pizza through no fault of your own. One that springs to mind is a woman who passive aggressively asked me why I had brought her chocolate dips for her chicken strippers. I took great delight in telling her that if she looked closer she would find that they were, in fact, barbeque.
I am aware of the general attitude towards this sort of work and, at a time where the working class in this country have been ‘told’ to go back to work despite the fact they would be risking their lives, this seems all the more pertinent. I am no stranger to being on the receiving end of this rhetoric.
Back then, my friend once mentioned she desperately needed a job. When I suggested joining me at Dominos, she laughed and said ‘not that’. Even worse, when I was delivering a pizza to a house, the teenage girl who answered the door was ushered away by her mother who whispered, just loud enough that I could hear, ‘see, this is why you do your GCSE’s.’ I think that biting anger and humiliation that churned in my stomach has stayed with me since then.
I will leave you with the words of A Slice of Life’s Matt Taylor, the manager from Llaneli, South Wales, who has made Domino’s his life’s work and even married a co-worker in Vegas after meeting her at the company’s annual convention. It’s safe to say he eats, lives and breathes sauce and cheese.
‘At my funeral, I wanna be cremated so the song that’s playing when I’m going into the little death chamber, I want the Domino’s chant. WHO ARE WE? DOMINO’S PIZZA. I want that on the go. I want the Domino’s flag draped over.
That’s how I’m going out, man. In style.’
Can’t argue with that.
Oh, and tip your drivers. Especially if you live up a dirt track with no discernible lighting or house number. Don’t be that guy.
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