Papa John's apologizes, buys us pizza

Cell phone rang. Looks like a GCSAA cell phone.

"This is Seth."

"Hi Seth, this is Ivan from Papa John's."

Hello!

OK, so here's what happened. A long time ago, I mailed out those two letters. Cork and Barrel got right back to me. Papa John's? The letter got returned to me -- return to sender, undeliverable.

Huh?

I checked the address. I used the address on the receipt, seemed simple enough. But the address was for the old Louisiana St. location.

It took me three weeks to take the time to re-send the letter. Finally, I got it back in the mail a few days ago, this time with the correct address.

Ivan is the manager of Papa John's. He apologized for the treatment I received there, and told me that I definitely should not have had to wait almost 30 minutes for my pizza. He told me walk-ins take priority, and their policy is to try to get that person worked in right away and out the door with pie in hand within 10, 15 minutes. He said he had read my letter at his most recent staff meeting for training purposes. He also told me that he looked back to see the day and time I arrived at Papa John's. On that day, the Holidome had a cook quit, and they were supposed to have some sort of pizza buffet... so they called Papa John's and placed an order for 100 pizzas.

"Usually, we have a week's head's-up on an order like that, but that was a case where we had no forewarning, so our crew was trying to handle the order," Ivan told me. "Still, that's no excuse. Your order should have been worked in. What I bet happened was, your pizza got boxed in with the Holidome's order."

Ivan said he was happy to repeat the order I had originally made and to comp both the pizza and the cheese sticks, if we were willing to give them a try again.

So I went in tonight to pick up our dinner. Ivan was waiting for me and again apologized. "Hey, things happen," I told him. "Yeah, but we try to minimize those things," he said.

Good pizza tonight. I'm happy that both businesses called me and worked with me to remedy the problems I had with them.

Now, to write that letter to Lew Perkins...