As a warning you should know that this is another risqué, adult oriented article, and you should not proceed if you are easily offended by the unvarnished truth. Plus, I’m about to ruin take out pizza for you. Sorry.
The world of employment risk would certainly be easier to navigate if we didn’t have to involve human employees in the equation. This is particularly true when the humans we employ turn out to be complete morons.
Imagine being the Risk Manager at Papa Murphy’s, a 1,300 location franchise pizza operation, and getting this phone call: An employee at one of your locations has been arrested for dragging his testicles across a customer's pizza. To compound the issue, the customer walked in and witnessed said employee “rubbing his testicles on the pizza he had ordered”.
I suppose that’s one way to spread the cheese.
It seems the employee working at a location about 25 miles from Austin, TX was angry with the customer for ordering a pizza just before closing time, and decided to exact his revenge in a most disgusting fashion. When confronted by the customer (I'm not sure how that exchange went – “Excuse me, I don't mean to be a bother, but is that pizza supporting your scrotum mine?”) The employee replied, “Man, I am really sorry, that was stupid.”
Yet another child left behind. And we are supposed to believe he is worth $15 an hour.
The customer then inquired about the employee's age, and upon learning he was 18, apparently said, “So you are old enough to know better than to put your balls on someone's pizza.” The employee, showing a glimmer of light at the end of a very dark intellectual tunnel, replied “Yes”.
For the record, the pizza at Papa Murphy’s is pretty good. It is unique in that it is a “take and bake” operation. They prepare the pizza for you, and you take it home to bake it in your own oven. We do not have one in our area, but I have patronized a location in Farmington, NM numerous times. And the lesson for risk managers everywhere is that the company did the right thing given an impossibly embarrassing situation.
After being alerted to the situation by the customer, the store manager got the employee to confess to his actions in a recorded phone call the following day. They then notified law enforcement. During the police interview, the employee “admitted to rubbing his testicles on [the customer's] pizza,” He stated that he “probably” would have given the customer his order had the patron “not seen his scrotum on the pizza”. In an apparent glimpse of something resembling remorse, he told the interviewing cops, “That's the terrible part”. The report notes that “substances such as fecal matter can be transferred by sweat to the scrotum and could have transferred to the pizza when [the employee] rubbed his scrotum on the pizza.”
Not exactly the stuff of a meat lovers dream, certainly.
I mean, how stupid is this? Never mind the childish and disgusting behavior – think of the simple logistics involved. If the customer could see what was happening when he walked in the door, then how visible was this idget brain when he dropped trou? I mean, the place probably has windows, man. Brilliant. Just Brilliant.
The penile pie guy was arrested and charged with tampering with a consumer product, a second-degree felony. He is free after posting $10,000 bail.
Oh, and he has been fired from Papa Murphy's.
In summary, the company did the only thing they could do, and it was the right thing at that. They notified authorities and quickly addressed the problem. It could have been worse. If they were not a “take and bake” concept, there could likely have been a workers’ compensation claim associated with this idiot's actions.
Either that or they would have to add Roasted Nuts to the list of available toppings.