I ordered pizza tonight. Pizza hut. My usual deal, where you get the Panalicious pizza with two topping, plus 2 of the following four options :  Caesar Salad, Cinnapart, Boneless Chicken Bites, and Breadsticks.

I always get the Cinnapart and the Caesar Salad. The Cinnapart, while messy, is still pretty tasty, and I am always up for a Caesar Salad.

Plus the Boneless Chicken Bites are way, way over-sauced and too greasy for my tastes, and the Breadsticks are snoresville.

Anyhoo, my food shows up and it’s my usual driver, a kindly seeming older German gentleman. I take my stuff and pay.

Only to realize that the rather hot ovoid on fins type container that caught my eye was not, in fact, a novel presentation of my salad, but some else’s enormous order of said Chicken Bites. Not sure what flavour but the sauce is black so I am guessing it’s one of their variations on Buffalo Sauce.

I wonder if they call it Bison Sauce in upstate New York.

Now normally, I would not bother making a fuss. I’d shrug and eat what I got, and email the chain afterward. But there were two extenuating facts :

1. I don’t like Buffalo Sauce or most BBQ sauce variations, and
2. Someone, somewhere, was not gonna get their gross Chicken Bites.

It was the second point that compelled me to do something about it.

So I call my local Pizza Hut, and believe it or not, I got no answer. None. What the fuck? Nobody is answering the phone at a PIZZA PLACE? That’s like a consumer electronics store not taking credit cards. It’s crazy-go-nuts lunacy.

Called back again. No answer. Once more, no answer. I am very close to letting it go through to voice-mail and giving them an earful, but I gave it one last try, mostly out of sheer cussedness but also because leaving voice-mail would have meant accept a reality in which you can call a major pizza chain and get no answer three times in a row, and I just wasn’t ready for that.

A surprising amount of people’s determination comes from weird shit like that.

Fourth time they pick up at the very last second and I explain the issue to someone, and it seems to throw her for a bit of a loop. Understandable. It’s not the kind of call they (hopefully) get all the time.

So she puts me on hold for a while, then some dude with a thick accent tells me to keep the chicken and they will send the salad.

Now, this is not a complaint by me, exactly. I mean, it cost me some stress and aggravation, but I actually profit by some potentially edible chicken.

What it is, instead, is a long-winded way of introducing the subject of incompetence – by which I mean people not doing their job – and me. Because as harmless as this incident was, it touched on some pretty damned big issues, and I want to explore those.

Because the thing is, things like the Chicken Bites Mishap have the potential to make me super angry. WAY angrier that is called for by the situation. There is a part of me that is absolutely furious about all the people who can’t seem to do the most basic part of their jobs right and how much bullshit I had to put up with as a result.

And anyone who knows their way around a psyche can tell you that when such a strong reaction is generated by such a minor source, it ain’t about what it’s about.

It is merely the trigger for something else. The spark, not the forest fire.

And I have a lot of issues surrounding people not being able to just do their fucking jobs. It’s a big chunk of my entire controlling/untrusting complex of issues. Why?

Because I have been deeply wounded by a lot of people who didn’t do their jobs. People such as but not limited to :

• Parents that didn’t parent.
• Teachers who ignored me and allowed me to be brutally bullies because they didn’t like me either
• Siblings too busy to look out for me or pay attention to me
• School administrators who ignored a crying child covered in scrapes, bruises, and his own blood for nearly an hour before telling me to go to class
• Therapists who tried to get me kicked out of their group
• A surgeon who apparently had never operated on a fat guy before so he ended up having to slice me open like a gutted fish to get my gall bladder out as opposed to doing it cleanly and competently via laproscopic surgery, which is the norm
• The nurses and orderlies who treated me like I was under quarantine, meaning my pain went untreated, as did several small complications, and who, when they did bother showing up, acted like they were being sent before Jabba the Hutt
• And oh, so, many more

It’s things like that which convince a guy like me that nobody can be trusted to do their goddamned jobs, that I can’t rely on anyone to ever have my back, and that the only safety comes in doing it by yourself, alone.

An extreme reaction, I admit, but you can see how hurt I have been in the past. I was abandoned by everyone who was supposed to be looking out for me, That makes me razor paranoid about it ever happening again, and makes me feel like I have to be ever vigilant and ready to make sure people do their jobs… or else.

This is not a healthy attitude. And I am glad to say it’s only a part of me, and not a dominant part. But there’s a lot of rage attached to it that I have no idea how to release.

It’s not like I can get back at the people who failed me. After all, some of them are family, and the rest are probably either dead or wouldn’t remember me at all.

But a lot of bad shit has happened to me because of other people’s incompetence, and all that rage and pain has to go somewhere if I am to get healthy.

I will ask my therapist about it next week.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.