Aftaka asked me to go undercover. To get inside one of Iceland’s major occupying corporations and write. I nodded and found myself biting my tongue on the edge of a massive table in a Powerpoint training session.

When people think of soda, they think Coca Cola; when they think of cereal, Kellogg’s; but when they think of pizza, one word, my word, my faceless name standing on their doorstep with a great big grin should oozingly manifest: Dominos Pizza.

True, i need money. But moreover i thought it would be interesting. To see the darkness behind the grins; the endless factory line production of a service industry servicing cardboard-wrapped-plastic-stomach-filler-oily-hollow-disks. Disks which give me serious bone chilling diarrhea, have always done.

My training session went well, i hadn’t swallowed so much laugh since school. The pride in the bosses face because Iceland is one of only two Domino states to have its v.e.r.y…o.w.n…c.a.l.l…c.e.n.t.e.r. That Domino’s Iceland is receiving the reinforcement of two new outfits. Its 70 cars its lazy cuisineless audience held willfully captive with more pies per person than the US National Security Agency. Me and the other Poles in this nonsense training session needed money, how much? An hour long speech about Dominos’ values and thats the one point left un-answerable.

To be that happy working for Dominos… well you must be stuffing yourself with cocaine, no doubt about it. Perhaps thats why their pizza’s give me such bad shits.

Working

I expected the work to be something terrible, like cold dough sticks. Or sinister, something really overtly sinister. But, well it wasn’t. I looked for the grunting flames of Mordor but there were…

At first. At first there were smiles, lots of them. Menial tasks like building pizza box towers which create the feeling of living under an avalanche, or an avalanche of endless pizza box filling, delivering, building, were automatically manufactured whilst we all chatted. Nonsense conversation, sure; heterosexually-dominant, of course; meaningless and banal but still all of this this destructive world of ours has made the norm. And Dominos is a very normal place. As normal as not crying throughout the evening news and of thinking your kids are lazy because they hate working and want to be artists instead.

But its strange because its such an extravagance. A ‘meal’ from Dominos is an event for the people who spend thousands of Kronur on the empty boxes. The ingredients are as fake as promises from a Prime Minister convinced he can make the world better. This event is so eventless.

And then. And then the banality set in. The normal boredom of the normal world. The faces of the customers with a hot sweaty box in hand still bored. When do they all smile? We the workers always smile. I noticed a poster in the staff area which reads “Sell more pizza, have more fun!” But the times i’ve passed a cardboard box to a pocket-emptied customer i feel like I’m lying to them. The awkward feeling of having just conned them into swapping money for a bowel clenching nothing keeps running over me. But i have to smile. I have to smile. Because Dominos is an event and the blue and red staff are the clowns, and there’s fuck all sadder than a sad clown. If the clowns can’t even be happy, then what hope have the rest of them?

I was told that I should choose what kind of mood to be in before working. Good. or bad. And bad isn’t a choice as a Dominos Pizza worker. We choose to be the happiest people in the world.

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In the coming week Dominos digs up Mega Week again, where all their baked nothings aren’t as extortionately expensive as always. Watch this space to see how Agent Finger Licker copes…

Part 2 is already up and can be found here