Now picture this, it's the last day of school for your school district and all of your friends are going out. You’d imagine any ordinary fresh out of high school graduate to go out with their friends and make some sort of grand occasion out of leaving the drudgery which is high school; however I am not as lucky as my friends, and I found myself in some sort of prison of my own volition, a Papa John’s. Not that I resent my job, in fact I genuinely enjoyed most of the time I was there. Unlike any other day I had worked months prior, so much was revealed to me about how hectic things could get. A flood of customers came during my 5-11 shift and things never ceased to calm down. I had to deal with angry customers confused why pizzas could not just magically be made when there are 20+ orders ahead of them, the stress of having orders to be remade because of a minor error, and all while attempting to manage the pizza oven and cutting pizzas when possible.

After a night of actual hell on Earth, I discovered the limits to patience and the limits of others. I learned that being a pizza boy wasn’t just a job but a formative experience that shaped who I was. I learned practical skills such as cooking and cleaning while developing a deeper more mature character and qualities like patience and confidence. Throughout my whole pizza making career the most valuable thing taken from there was the shift in how I saw life. Your job doesn’t define you or your character, what you do with your job and how you decide to shape your perspective does. I believe life has been perfectly defined by Abraham Lincoln, “We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses”. Life is what we make it and having diverse, complex, and understanding perspective allows us to better ourselves and the world around us.