The doors bell chimed with a light ting when two men walked into the store at 3:10, with a young child in tow.
“Welcome in! How can I help y’all?” I asked them as I turned to face them.
“Hello, we are here to pick up an order,” The first man said to me. He was dressed casually, wearing jeans and a tucked-in button-down shirt. I smiled at him and noticed that the second man appeared more formal, like a bodyguard, with a black suit and sunglasses. I shifted my gaze down to the computer screen and found his order.
“John Dare, right? “ I said with a smile, “We’ve gotcha on here, however, you’re a bit early so it will be a couple of minutes.”
“Wow, you’re good. It’s our first time in and you guessed right. That’s alright about the wait, we have time don’t we?” He said as he gave a look to the man in the suit, who now wore a frown on his face.
“The bodyguard decides,” I giggled. The man in the suit smiled, turned, and left. I felt my face turn red. “I am so sorry, did I offend him?” I asked
“Haha no, he’s just awkward. Also, if you don’t mind me asking, weren’t you the girl who worked at the old pizzeria that shut down recently?” Feeling relieved, I smiled.
“You have a good memory! I did, I left before it shut down though, why do you ask?”
“Well, I heard some weird stuff happened over there from time to time”, he picked up the child, ”and this little one loves creepy and weird stories, got any to share while we wait?” The kid looked at me wide-eyed, she must’ve been 5 or 6. I smiled and leaned over the counter, “What kind of story would you like to hear, I have lots of them. The ghost that tormented people ill-fated, the inter-dimensional phones, or malevolent oven?”
“The phones!” She said as she clapped her hands together, “ Are they like the portals from Gravity Falls?” She asked. I looked at the clock, 3:11.
“Sure, we have time, but you can decide that for yourself, now let’s see, where should I start with this one”
When I first started working at that particular pizzeria, there was a lot going on, tons of drama, so many mice, and heaps of dirt, my goodness. I spent most of my time on my days off clocking in and cleaning the place. The other distractions of the clearly uncared-for restaurant made sure that I did not give the ancient phone system more than a look of annoyance when I first saw it. It did bother one of my coworkers who worked up front most of the time and had to use the phone system daily. She asked the manager once about it, and he simply told her that the original system had broken, and the owner decided to be cheap and got a second-hand system, that was all he knew about it. I never really paid any mind to it after my first annoyance, because as long as it worked, that was all that mattered. The first time it happened, it was unusually busy for a Tuesday afternoon. A new hire called me to the POS system because he was having trouble finding a customer’s address for delivery,
“Hello, thank you for calling, I am the shift lead at |||||||||||||| in |||||||||||. I understand you are having some trouble placing a delivery order?”
“Yes, your employee cannot find my address, can you please help me?”
“Of course, is your address |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||?” I read off the computer to confirm with her,
“Yes, that is my address” I tried to put the order through, but I got a pop-up that said the address did not exist.
“One moment, ma’am, looks like our computer is having some technical issues” I retyped the address, but nothing appeared. The computer told me the address did not exist. I motioned to my coworker to type the address into Google Maps on his phone, also nothing.
“I apologize for the inconvenience ma’am, it looks like our computer system is down right now, and we can not take any deliveries at the moment. I would recommend ordering through the website, as it works on a different system, again, I am so sorry”
“Don’t worry about it, it happens. By the way, did you guys get rid of the cashier with the Middle Eastern accent? She is usually the one to answer the phone”
“I think you may have the wrong place, we do not have anyone with a Middle Eastern accent working here” I responded, confused.
“Ah, forget it then. I will order online, keep an eye out for it!” I heard the click on the other end as the line went dead.
“That was weird,” My coworker said
“Yeah, we have never had a girl with a Middle Eastern accent work here” I responded. My other coworker working the second register surprisingly had heard of this girl before
“Actually, I have had multiple people call and ask about this girl. They always seem so surprised when it is not her that picks up. Do you think she could work at the |||||||||||||||| location?”
“Who knows, we have work to do, gossip later,” I said as I turned and went to the back. That was the first incident I experienced with the phones, the ones after only got stranger and more disturbing.
I tend to group the second occurrences not because they all happened second, but because they were all quite similar. What I am speaking about is the customers who did not exist. It happened every so often that we would get a call from someone claiming to be a regular, but I remember every customer’s face and name. I knew the regulars’ orders by heart, and whenever these strangers called claiming to be regulars, I always knew differently because of my memory, and because the computers had an autosave system. When a customer called for the first time, the computer automatically created an account for them attached to the phone number. The computer recorded every order placed under that specific phone number. I always checked with the ‘regular’ to see if they had a different phone number, but they always denied that, claiming to always use the empty one they were calling on to order, they always mentioned the girl with the Middle-Eastern accent as taking their calls as well. We did not get these calls often, but it was usually in the last two weeks of the month when the frequency of the calls picked up. It was a call like this that lead to the third and last odd thing that happened…
“Did a big portal open up? Did you have an epic battle with the employees at the other store?” The little girl interrupted me looking very interested.
“Haha, sadly no, that would have been fun though!” I responded.
“Then what was the last thing that happened?” The man asked with his usual concern on his face when I told stories. I smiled, 3:13, we had time.
It was right after a snowfall in early February. It was cold that particular Saturday morning. The owner of the mall wanted to keep bills low, so our only source of heat was the oven. There were only a few of us there that morning, my manager, myself, and our prep guy. We weren’t doing much that morning, so I was excited to be relieved of boredom when the phone rang.
“Hello! This is |||||||| in |||||||, how can I help you today?”
“Yes, hello, I would like to place a delivery order” The call was just a standard delivery order. We made the pizza and sent it to the manager, who was also taking deliveries that day. However, I received a call 20 minutes later from my manager.
“Hey, can you send me the lady’s number? I am at the address, but the guy who opened the door said they did not order the pizza.”
“Yeah, sure. It’s ||||||||||”
“Thanks, I’ll be back soon once I figure this out.”
It was almost an hour later when she returned.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but some weird shit is happening.”
“Well make it short cause I need to know if I need to refund her”
“I called the number you gave me, and she picked up and confirmed it was her. I asked her to give me the correct address, and she told me the one I was at.”
“Thats weird, they must have been pranking you or something, does she need the refund or not” I wasn’t really interested in the story, I just wanted to know if I needed to refund the lady or not. She seemed to ignore me though.
“I asked her to describe the house, like, maybe she was across the street. She told me she was in a red-paneled house with steps and a gold car. The house I was at was grey with a black car and no porch or steps, and after driving around, I found no houses like the one she described. I asked her if there were any trees or plants in the yard that I could identify, and she told me there was a Japanese red Maple in the front yard, and the only place I found that tree was the house of the address”
“Wooow Sherlock, did you investigate the mystery of if she needed a refund or not?”
“Shut it girly! This is where it gets super weird. So I asked her to describe the house across the street from her, and she described the exact house across the street from me. At that point I gave up, so I told her we would give her a refund”
“Wonderful, you could have told me that from the beginning,” I said as I typed in the refund and sent it through”
“So that was the end of it? The house just didn’t exist?” Asked John,
“Yes and no, we never heard from her again, but one last thing happened to the phones about two months later, I needed to wrap this up quickly, 3:14.
I came in one day to everyone freaking out, the old phones had disappeared, just like that, all four of them. We tore the place apart looking for them that night, but we got nothing. After we had closed that night, I went through the cameras with the manager and owner to try and see where the phones had gotten off to. As I watched the recording, it was exactly 3:15 pm when a sun ray reflected off the glass, and blinded the camera for exactly one second. When the camera returned, the phones were gone, not the bases or boxes, just the phones themselves. What was even weirder was that the manager who had spoken to the lady from the delivery was in that room when it happened, and her phone restarted. When it did, all of her call logs and contacts were gone. It was overall weird, but after we got new phones, nothing else happened.
“Wow! That is so cool! It was like the Men in Black came in and stole the phones!”
“I bet they did!” I said as I grabbed the box with their pizza in it.
“I wonder if they will be after me to try to erase my memory,” I said as I made direct eye contact with the man as I handed him the box, he looked rather pale after that statement.
“Thank you for the story, we will be on our way.” As he walked out the door, the sun caught perfectly, and as the clock hit 3:15, I turned and closed my eyes for exactly one second as light filled the room, his order disappeared from the computer screen, and my coworkers lost all memory of him coming in.
