Pickup or Delivery?

by Mike

It was a rather slow Friday night. Neither Doug [his roommate - ed.] nor myself really felt like cooking, so we did what any self respecting college student would do and decided to call up Papa John's. That was our first mistake.

As it turns out, there wasn't a menu anywhere in the apartment. So we go online and get the number for the one in College Park. Nothing unusual, nothing that we suspected of being pure unmitigated evil. So we call up the Papa, only to learn that the CP Papa John's was being renovated and would be closed until the very next day. This should have tipped us off, but our minds were not functioning at peak capacity due to hunger, so we just shrugged it off as being an interesting coincidence. But, in our blissful ignorance of the plot afoot, we simply called the next closest one, which was in Hyattsville and a mere two or three miles away. We soon learn that they don't deliver to CP. After a brief discussion, Doug and I decided that it was worth the effort to pick it up, as it was only a couple of miles down 193. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into.

We set out to get the pizza, after receiving instructions from a person that, at the time, we did not realize was the source of all the evil in the world. His name was Yah'hoo. Now, I'd dealt with Yah'hoo before, and while his directions were never great, they always got me where I needed to go. In a sense, that was what happened this time; in another, more literal sense, he sent us through hell and back.

He started out being petty; he sent us the wrong way down 193. We went like 3 or 4 miles before we decided we should turn around, so it wasn't that big a deal. Eventually we found the place where Yah'hoo had told us to turn, and that was where the real trouble began.

We wound up going along a dark and very creepy street (I believe it was actually Elm Street). It twisted and turned, and a black cat crossed our path several times. Soon we realized the terrible truth; though we had driven for several minutes between each encounter, they were all the same cat. And then it hit us; we were trapped in a maze. It took us four hours of driving around until we finally emerged onto a lit street, and lo and behold, the Papa John's was there. We went in, got our pizza, and set out to leave. And on the way out, we realized just how cruel a trick Yah'hoo had played on us... Papa John's was right on 193!

And wouldn't you know it, the pizza was cold.