Gas and pizza

Today gas prices miraculously dropped to below $3.00 a gallon, thus falling more than 30 cents below its peak price from a month ago. I do not know if we withdrew our troops from some oil-rich country we invaded or if we invaded an oil-rich country who was happy to be invaded or if an oil-rich country took pity on our gas prices and invaded us, but hello operator, please connect me to the White House so I can express my gratitude. Who knows, maybe Americans just got rid of their Chevys and started using Hondas instead.

Yesterday was scavengers day at the office. What happens is, every week we have our customers coming here to be trained on our software and along with educating them, we also feed them, clothe them and medicate their anal fissures just like Jesus and the Buddha ordered us to. Wednesday is pizza day when they order pizza for the customers being trained. Wednesdays I do not bring lunch money. What I do instead is, I wait for their lunch to get over and then I run over to the training room and scavenge the leftover pizza.

But word of free pizza spreads like herpes at a frat house party. So, there is stiff competition for the leftover slices from the rest of my office colleagues. If I am late, not only will I not get the choice slices topped with mushrooms, pepperoni, sausage and whale penis, if I am extraordinarily late, I might not even get to scavenge the plain cheese pizza.

The trick, therefore, is to recognize the exact moment when our customers are done with their lunch and then make like the wind. I have developed a technique. Most men, after consuming pizza and soda, withdraw to the restroom. Luckily, my cubicle is closest to the restroom. So, when I start to hear the dulcet sounds of rapid fire sequential flushes emanating from the restroom, I know that lunch has been consumed and soon the pizza will be unprotected and ready to be pillaged.

This technique has worked well for me in the past. However, during a few recent Wednesdays, I have been observing that the accuracy of restroom flushes as a measure of lunch culmination has been compromised, thus leading to a number of unimpressive pizza harvests for me. Upon further investigation, I concluded that one of my co-scavenging colleagues surreptitiously bribed the office pizza procurer into not procuring soda along with the pizza, which, as a result, greatly reduced the post-pizza restroom excursions of our customers, thus, foiling my elaborate plan.

Obviously I have been outmaneuvered for the time being. But my brain is now working overtime in order to figure out a Plan B. Free pizza, as they say, is the mother of all invention.