Contestants performed before a panel of industry professionals including C.B. Hudson, member of the internationally acclaimed rock band BLUE OCTOBER, and his wife Betsy Hudson, former dancer for the Houston Texans and choreographer.

I’m a member of the Wedding Photojournalist Association (WPJA.com).  A juried association of photojournalists who have given up the newspaper lifestyle and moved into photographing weddings.  The WPJA is really just a mode of advertising to me.  Christina had to drag me into putting up the money that it costs to be a member.  Plus we had to build a new website that was specifically their required ratio of photojournalism/posed pictures from a wedding.  I was not a big fan of this from the beginning and was very hard to convince.  Eventually I figured, It was okay and joined.  Traffic from the WPJA has been very slow and in a year and a half of being a member the membership has grown 3-4 times.  We’ve only gotten one wedding from this organization and it was due to the death of another photographer who was in the WPJA.  There was a lot of chatter on the WPJA forums about this photographers death and my wife felt she needed to say something on the forums in the form of a condolence.  I don’t read the stupid forums and rarely read the trivial emails that liter my email box every other day from the WPJA and Christina has always been the person who does any communication with the WPJA.  It’s always been her thing.  My name just happens to be on it.  Well apparently, the people who run WPJA have way too much time on their hands and about two months after the postings emailed this:

I live in a suburb of Austin, Texas called Round Rock.  They’re not really sure what the population is because about 50,000 people have moved here in the last ten years but it’s around 80-90k.  The town is growing so fast that they haven’t even finished roads and have people ready to move in.  I live in a subdivision called Sam Bass Trails named after a bank robber, but no one knows that because a big truck knocked over the sign at the entrance to the subdivision and it was hauled off long ago.  I’ve only heard tales told and have never seen it.  Last year a small strip mall was built and the only business in it’s 15,000 sq/ft was Dominoes Pizza.  Dominoes only used a small portion of the space which parts of remain empty still.  From the moment I bought my house, the little voice inside of my head has been prompting me to try the pizza thing.  I don’t really need the money but have time to kill because I am way too efficient with being a photographer and have boring spells where I write stupid blogs about thing just like this.

October this year rolled around and I decided to do it.  My brother had actually been a delivery driver for them for several months.  I think he was looking for something that required very little mental effort as his last job running tech support for an internet provider wiped him out.  I filled out the application form which I haven’t done in many years and returned it.  They hired me the next day.  I think I might have been a little overqualified for the job but they seemed not to care.

My training and beginning day was October 5th.  I was feeling kind of weird.  I’m not used to having people tell me when and where to be.  I’m not used to having someone else dictate anything to my life unless it is a client, and with that I can always say no or at least have it on my terms.  I was on time, but I wasn’t sure if I would make it.  After all it was about 100 yards away from my house.

The first thing they did when I arrived was have me put on the Dominoes uniform: a blue teeshirt and hat both with the logo on them.  I put it on and looked in a mirror.  “Oh,” was all I murmured and rolled my eyes thinking of how ridiculous I looked.  Wearing this outfit made me look so stupid.  I was starting to regret my decision to try this job at that instant.  It got worse when the ‘manager’, a long haired guy five years younger than myself told me and another trainee to tuck in my shirt to abide by Dominoes policy or as I decided it should better be called: The Unholy Law.  I am not a chubby fellow nor am I a skinny fellow.  I am average build.  Tucking in a teeshirt does nothing for hiding some of the chub that I would rather people imagine.  I NEVER tuck in a shirt.  I specifically buy dress shirts to shoot weddings that are not meant to be tucked in.  The only thing I will tuck in is a dress shirt for a suit and that’s covered by a suit coat NOT TUCKED IN!

I tucked in my shirt and walked into the training room, a small 4×6 office where I was subjected to the training video which mostly was about how the computer tracking system worked.  I failed the tests at the end which I assume is a bad sign, but eventually figured it out.

Delivering pizza was the next step.  A pizza ride along was next.  They give you over to an experienced pizza delivery person and you see how it’s done.  This was the clincher.  My brother was who I was riding along with.  That was good for me.  It was a kind of tandem pizza delivery thing where I would follow him up to the door and deliver the pizza with him and observe.  I thought it just made us look like idiots.  How many delivery people does it take to deliver one stupid pizza.  I started observing the customers at each delivery and noticed that most of them were not the happy people who I had expected waiting patiently for their pizza.  They were hungry and wanted their damn pizza.  I found out quickly that the longer it took, the less of a tip there was.  In my head I started devising an if statement to represent this:

Definitions: Customer time (a), Travis tip (b), 30 minutes (ah), 60 minutes (ai), 90 minutes (au)

if a if a>ah and a if a>ai and a if a>au then better to eat the pizza myself
end if

I was really freaked out.  The people who ordered pizza really weren’t angry, but had so many different personalities.  Not everyone laughs at the same jokes to the same degree.  Not everyone finds my bumbling Woody Allen-esque mumbling amusing and some down right hate it.  I was worried. We got back after the deliveries and now it was my turn to deliver and be watched by my ride along brother.

We put the Dominoes sign on top of my car and set off with three orders at once.  Two on different sides of town and one at an old lady’s house around the corner who they called Wheelchair Lady.  I was informed that Wheelchair Lady was a Dominoes regular who was remembered not just because she was in a wheelchair but because she required the delivery boy to enter her house, get her a Coke from the fridge and a glass from her cupboards.  She smoked heavily and her entire house was mired in the stench.  I think this first delivery of mine made up my mind that delivering pizza was not for me.  We were gone for an hour delivering three pizzas and when I returned I told the manager I was done.  He just smiled as if he knew I wouldn’t make it from the beginning.  I hung up my hat and shirt and walked out as soon as they doled out my tips.  THANK YOU GOD FOR MAKING ME SELF EMPLOYED!

Dominoes was started by a devout Catholic who sold the pizza chain for $1 billion in the 90s.  He is currently starting a city where his devout Catholicism can be the ruling law of the land.

The Dell factor.  Why is Round Rock growing so damn fast?  This is the corporate headquarters of Dell  Corp.  They employ 10,000 in Round Rock and another 10,000 inAustin 5 miles south.  In 2005 Dell sold $50 billion in computers and electronics.  They have a 60 year deal with the city of Round Rock to split sales tax revenue which has caused property taxes to be cut by more then half since 1993.  The city receives sales tax revenue on $5 billion dollars of Texas computer sales.  People ask why I moved here.  Now you know.

My brother had left a note on our master bath toilet saying that the bob had broken and he had shut it off a few days earlier.  I was happy to find it shut off and proceeded to buy the parts that I needed to fix the problem.  I learned a valuable lesson that day.  NEVER buy anything that is not factory sealed from Home Depot.  I think they take customer returns, and put them back on the shelf with out even looking at the contents.  I bought the first part and found bits missing, got rather upset because I couldn’t remember which of the 500 Home Depots I bought it at and bought another one with out taking the other back.  I got it all fixed and was quite happy with out accoplishments for the day.  At last I could have a toilet to myself once again.  Happy days.

Well, since then we took over one of the kids bedrooms as an office while waiting to get a real office, rebuilt the website after hackers took down our server and spent an arm and a leg on having a part fixed on my air conditioning.  All in a days work for the self emloyed home owner.  Then it happened.  I got the mail with zeal like I always do.  There was a bunch of crap that went into the recycling pile, and a couple of bills.  One was a bogus bill from an internet company trying to tell me I owe them money for advertising my website when they have never done anything for me and are just hoping that I’m stupid enough to send them money and the other was the water bill.  Yes, the water bill.  Sure, to people who have been living in their house, taking showers, washing clothes and watering their lawn it wasn’t that much money.  But I had only been living in the house for two of the weeks that they were billing me for and it seemed a little high for that.  I did the math and figured out that we had used about 5-6 times as much water as usual in our two weeks back.  Kind of odd.  It was about 45,000 gallons more then we usually use.  It turned out that that had run though the toilet after the bob broke before my brother shut the water off.  On our toilets thats about 32,000 flushes.  It’s kind of a bargain if you think that it only cost about $80 extra.