Perils of Pizza

So...I was catching up on my blog links, and I came across the following post at Lyrical Munchies (formerly Munchies for the Addiction, which I must now change on my sidebar):

"The ability to order pizza online has got to be one of the greatest things that has come out of the invention of the Internet. You choose your pizza, add toppings, throw in some bread sticks and drinks, and pay for everything, all with a few clicks of a button. You can even tip the driver, long before the pizza arrives at your door. Hey, it's not that I can't stand the element of human interaction when ordering a pizza; I'm just too lazy to pick up the phone."

I was going to post a comment, but the post is two weeks old, and my exaggerated cartoon character reaction ("geeeeeeaaaaaaahwwwwuuuuuuuuuhhhh?!") merited a longer commentary.

So this, I have to say to you, Munchies: NO. NO. Ordering pizza online is a TERRIBLE invention. Among the worst, right after plus-size spandex and the Star Wars missile defense system. Having worked at Corporate Pizza Joint, which may or may not be the leader in online pizza-ordering (I guess I can't get dooced anymore, but the vagueness is habit), for 3+ years, I can assure you that nothing could elicit more groans from the staff than an online order popping up on the cook screen.

Now, sometimes all goes well and absolutely nothing happens. Sometimes, unfortunately, equals out to "1 in 18 billion" in my experience.

What's wrong with online ordering?
1. Well, there's the slight oversight that it's not personalized according to store. Want banana peppers on your pizza? Well, TOO FUCKING BAD, because this location doesn't carry them. Also no Dr Pepper. But will the online doohickey catch that? Oh, no. No, of course not. That's too easy.
2. So we're generally charged with trying to call the guy that wants banana peppers and Dr Pepper, and nine times out of ten, he has ordered online because he's too baked to find his cell phone and has no freaking clue what we're trying to explain to him (if he has actually now managed to find his phone so that he even answers).
3. That, of course, is if we can tell him, since people who order online generally have a complete inability to correctly type their phone number.
4. Then, if we have managed to sort things out, the pricing is wrong because of the banana peppers, so the orderer will argue with us for ten minutes, insisting that the new price we're quoting him is wrong, and he's pissed anyway because we don't have banana peppers, and how was he suppposed to know that? (This is a perfectly valid complaint.) So he gets a discount.
5. Please note the above scenario is best case. Most online orders are much more like the time some lady ordered a supreme/combo/garbage/whatever you want to call it and then diligently clicked the "NO" button for every topping she didn't want...which left her with, I kid you not, a 17-dollar cheese pizza. Then she bitched about the price, insisting, "All I got was cheese!" I think the delivery driver is still in prison after embedding a quarter in her left eye.

My brain is about to explode from all the horrifying memories of these scenarios.