(Pizza Hut) – (Pizzas) = Mayhem

Every Ramadan for the past four years, I have been visiting pizza hut with my friends to participate in their famous ‘All You Can Eat (AYCE)’ deals. The deal is nothing but a so called orgy of men and pizzas. Lots of hungry men and women come to the pizza hut outlets across the country during the holy month of fasting and as soon as the sun sets they break their fast like greedy pigs… and yours truly is one of those pigs devouring whatever he could get his hands on.

So, today was the day when it was decided that we shall be visiting one pizza hut. The outlet chosen was at Shaheed e Millat Road, Karachi. Our past experience had been pretty ok with that outlet which is well built, spacious and quite fine gentry visiting the place.

I left for the place at 6:45 PM as we had decided to meet there at 7:15, in contrast to past years, i was to meet only one man – the good old dAs! Before i even reached there, i started getting his messages like ‘The place is crowded with chicks’ and ‘Just standing there… My Roza is getting ruined’,
’Oh Yeah!’, i thought! and my hunger suddenly raised a new peak.

Anyways, we were seated at an over crowded facility… and that place seemed totally opposite to the pizza hut we used to know. it was over crowded, with perhaps the worst and most rowdy crowd ever gathered at that place. On top of the noisy ones were perhaps a group of 15+ teenage boys (perhaps from some college) who might have come to pizza hut in this large number for the first time ever in their lives. They were whistling and yelling and hooting for anything they might find interesting. The most commonly occuring thought on my head was ‘Well, if they say that all the devils are locked away in this month, then what the hell are these creatures?’

As the time to break the fast was announced, we started with the dates and some salad. The pizza was to be served after fifteen minutes…. and man o man what followed after those fifteen minutes was one unique experience in itself!

The first servings of pizzas were taken by everyone very easily. This is how it begins, pizza comes out of the kitchen and disappears very quickly only to be followed by a continuous supply of pizzas. After two turns (or may be three – who bothers counting?) the servers seemed to vanish and with them the pizzas. Initially people remained seated patiently waiting.. but after 10 minutes or so, they became impatient…. the rowdy bunch of kids that i wrote about yesterday became ever uneasy. People picked up their forks and knives and started hitting the places – thus the melody of hungry people was born inside the premises of pizza hut. with the melody came the vocals (and I must assure you they were hoarse and abusive). The servers and floor manager could do nothing but to request the people to stay calm but to no avail. Finally after fifteen minutes, the first pizzas of the second session started to serve but they disappeared only on the first tables. The crowd from the back tables were getting restless and they started more yelling. I saw some families get up from their seats and started to leave. The manager tried to stop them only to get into an argument. The serving of pizzas continued slowly, still the supply was not on full throttle. So, everybody got their slices with a delayed interval.

So, after wasting around one and a half hour after the iftar, we thought that our tummies are now full. So we left the place and paid the full sum of money.

I am not sure what went wrong with the supply of pizzas, but it has never happened earlier with me so I would ignore it by calling it ‘an unfortunate mishap’. Perhaps their ovens malfunctioned or their raw pizzas were not readied in time… we can never be sure what happened back there but it surely did cause a lot of frustration among the attendees. But that frustration was transformed into a fun-filled non-violent protest… I still smile over the melodious striking of forks on empty plates and tweeting and whistling and yelling… especially that crowd of kids who were honking as if they were in some Lahore Theater watching mujra