Chapter 4

Saturday, late morning, the weekend before Spring Break Week--Tylea and Lee.

The Pizza Grande Northeast Regional Operations Center control room looked like something more akin to what might be used by a commercial airline to manage its operations than a simple pizza delivery company. Jack Perkins, the Sigma Lambda Tau engagement team leader and a soon-to-be graduating senior at Middlebury College, looked over the room from the center of the rear and on the uppermost of three tiers as he made his appraisal.

The Sigma Lambda Tau team had traveled to this building in the Brookline section of the Boston metropolitan area via a limo that had left very early that morning from Middlebury. There had been coffee, tea, water, croissants, fruit, and yogurt loaded aboard to ensure that they would not arrive hungry in Boston, as the vehicle had left before the normal Saturday morning brunch serving time at the Sigma Lambda Tau house.

The room they were standing in now was shaped in a similar manner to one of the larger presentation rooms or mini-theaters at an upscale museum. There were three tiers running the width of the room, the width being the longer dimension by about a three-to-one ratio. Each tier was populated with workstations, each with dual high-definition monitors connected to a thin-client box, along with a keyboard. Behind each keyboard was a Pizza Grande Operations Center employee wearing a wireless headset and working at a keyboard with wireless mouse with a personalized secure smart card access to the central server for the computer system.

While Jack was looking at the layout of the workstations on the three successively higher tiers, Marta, Tylea, and Lee were examining the multiple-section wall-sized frame-style screen dominating the front wall. 'This almost looks like an IMAX theater, ' thought Lee with a little chuckle.

William H. "Deuce" Hartwell, Jr., had welcomed the four young Sigma Lambda Tau Society members into the building earlier and had passed out some of his business cards to them. This had followed a TSA-like screening that included metal detector walk-through and a body scanner that showed their bodies under their clothing with a clarity that would have put the TSA's airport systems to shame--while giving competition to a lot of porn photographers. Nothing had been said about deleting the images after the screening either.

After receiving "Accompanied Visitor" badges, a young lady whose employee ID badge indicated her name as "Lydia" had led them to a small conference room. There they had been offered coffee, tea, or water to drink, along with small bite-sized Danish puffs and--what else--small squares of Pizza Grande pizza on warming dishes, while they awaited their hosts.

The very tall and handsome Deuce Hartwell had entered after only about a two-minute wait, wearing not a suit, but tailored slacks and a designer pullover knit shirt that looked like an expensive golf shirt with a Pizza Grande logo--interlocking the letters P and G in what the youngsters would learn later was a Pizza Grande proprietary font style. The type face was evidently copyrighted in the same manner as the font style for the numerals on the backs of the football jerseys at the nearby Boston College or at the University of Missouri. Lydia had smiled at the foursome again and left the room, leaving them in the hands of the new arrivals.

Hartwell looked to be rather young to be the Chairman of such a successful company; early forties, no discernible gray visible yet in his light brown hair; gray eyes; very white teeth. He smiled at the young foursome and introduced them to the young lady that had shadowed him into the room, Melinda Lowery.

Melinda, the young Personal Assistant, was evidently a late-twenties Girl Friday, carrying a tablet computer with her everywhere she went and wearing a Bluetooth earpiece in order to field phone calls or other internal electronic voice communications directed to her for her own benefit or that of Hartwell. Jack noted that the raven-haired woman was quite slender, yet still gave off an aura of sexiness that would gain the attention of any healthy hetero male.

"Welcome to the Northeast Region headquarters for Pizza Grande; and remember our motto, 'It's about more than just pizza.'" Hartwell looked sideways at his PA and they both sort of chuckled at what appeared to be an inside joke that was lost on the four Sigma Lambda Tau members.

They all got comfortable moving to stand together around the conference table, though no one sat because there were no chairs. Hartwell smiled at the question in the eyes of the four young visitors.

"I tell my folks that meetings should only be long enough to cover any major difficulties and agree on a solution, but short enough to allow the responsible staff member to take that solution out the door and get it into effect--or at least get started--before the end of the day. Thus, we rarely have meetings that last longer than about ten minutes. I got the idea from my brother, who is a software developer using the eXtreme Programming method. Stand-up meetings are one of the hallmarks of that methodology."

"Sir?" asked Marta, "Are we going to get access badges that allow us more freedom of action for our duties here next week? Or are we going to have to be screened and accompanied in here for the duration of the engagement?"

Melinda spoke up for her boss, since he was negotiating a mouthful of pizza bite at the moment. "Oh, you won't we working out of this facility. You will be working out of our Special Call and Delivery Center in town, but you will be staying at your hotel nearby when you are not actually learning about the pizza business at one of our stores, or while out on regular or..." here she grinned, " ... special deliveries." The building in which they stood at that moment was almost invisible from the surrounding residential area of Brookline, since it blended in so well.

"Today," Melinda continued, "we just wanted to give you a better picture of our operations and get you up to speed on what you would be doing for us next week. Oh! And we need to get you guys over to the studio to take glamour shots for the web page as well; we have you scheduled at two o'clock."

"Glamour shots?" asked Jack. "What the hell ... excuse me, Sir..." Jack turned to Deuce Hartwell, blushing at his close call with swearing in this business environment with people he had only known for more than a few minutes. Recovering quickly, Jack continued. "What do we need with glamour shots, and how do OUR pictures figure into a web page for pizza?"

Deuce Hartwell laughed outright at this. "Pal, you obviously don't understand our business model as fully as you will need to before the week begins. That is why you are here today a little early and why you needed to see the guts of our operation before you begin on Monday. Like I said a couple of minutes ago; 'it's about more than just pizza.' That is the company motto for a very good ... and unique reason. Come on, and I'll show you as we go."

That had all occurred just ten minutes earlier. Now they were all standing on the top tier in the theater-like room in the main operations center and were viewing the left-most one-third of the video wall at the front. On screen, cued up, so to speak, was an online video with the URL showing as <http://www.sexyandfunny.com/watch_video/wrong-door-striptease_427.html>.

"I want you all to watch this video and tell me what you think," instructed Hartwell as he nodded to one of the controllers at a workstation to his left.

Onscreen, they all saw a gorgeous young blonde girl dressed in jeans, a scarf, a pullover top, and a jacket. As the video went into motion, the girl tapped on a door to an apartment displaying a numeral 6. The apartment was on a hallway that was an open style for the apartment building with a multi-story floor-to-ceiling atrium type lobby and railings on the inside edges of the hallways at each level, allowing the residents to look down into the lobby's interior from all levels.

The girl then began one of the most sensuous and erotic dances imaginable, with magnificent hip motions and use of arms and hair to accentuate her body movements. She methodically, over the next few seconds, stripped down to just her golden skin without tan lines and without a bit of body hair visible below her chin. She continued to undulate sensuously for the unseen viewer gazing at her through the security portal in the apartment door in front of which she danced until the music in the video stopped and the door opened--revealing an octogenarian couple, the old husband smiling and the wife scowling at the beautiful nude girl.

The old man pushed the numeral up to reveal that it is actually an indicator for Apartment 9 rather than Apartment 6 and it had fallen loose earlier. Realizing she was at the wrong apartment, the girl blushingly grabbed all her clothing and rushed off. At that point, the video ended.

After they all had finished chuckling at the video and the controller had returned the portion of the video wall to normal duties, with lines of numbers and small insert maps appearing, Hartwell got the attention of the four college students. "This video is indicative of a couple of aspects of our business model." Seeing the slight frowns on their faces, he continued.

"We do deliver great pizza and are making slow but sure inroads into the conventional pizza delivery market, although we do not compete with the big boys by operating either company-owned or franchise sit-down restaurants. We are strictly delivery or carry-out." Seeing the somewhat confused looks on the students' faces, Hartwell continued.

"While we DO specialize in pizza delivery, our primary cash flow comes from the 'more than just pizza' part. The girl in the video you just saw was obviously someone hired to deliver a Stripper-Gram. Stripper-Grams became popular a couple of decades ago and continue to be popular in major cities. But they are beginning to wane in popularity. We, however, offer something else besides just Stripper-Grams or pizza; something even better."

Waiting for about fifteen seconds to see if they could guess, Hartwell was disappointed that they could not seem to figure it out. Suddenly, Lee exclaimed, "You deliver the girl!"

"Excellent!" smiled Hartwell. "Yes, we have a secure online server, where the ladies and gentlemen are pictured--yes, there is a demand for masculine delivery, mostly hetero, as well--and the customer can order his or her pizzas delivered by the ... uh... 'Delivery Talent Associate' of his or her choice. Ike," he directed to the controller who had run the video earlier, "call up the main web page, will you?"

On the video wall, there appeared a web page with a navigation bar and pictures. The man named Ike clicked one of the pictures; those showing several torso-up shots of gorgeous ladies all within an age range that appeared to be from early twenties to early forties, depicted with very nice makeup, jewelry, and wearing nice deep-cleavage cocktail dresses. When he expanded the JavaScript icon below one of the ladies' pictures, the youngsters could see a short sexual curriculum vitae on the lady, with her measurements, her sexual preferences, and her sexual limitations, along with the fee for her services--Jack's eyes bugged out slightly at the amounts indicated.

"What you really mean..." Marta turned to Hartwell, "is that your cash flow comes mainly through delivering sex with the pizza. You basically operate a cathouse on wheels; right?"

"Give the little lady a gold star!" said Hartwell with a laugh. The foursome looked among themselves, a bit surprised at this revelation. "Papa John's sells what they allege are better ingredients and Dominos sells faster delivery. Well, we sell delivery pussy along with the pizza; oh, and it really IS good pizza, by the way."

Looking around at Jack and Lee, he added, "For the ladies out there in the community, we also sell delivery cock; so get ready to become icons in the pizza and sex business, Boys. There are a lot of horny women out there who order online at our secure web server.

"You all need to realize that the PG in our logo stands for 'Pussy-Gram' just as much as it stands for Pizza Grande. We specialize in bachelor and bachelorette parties, fraternity parties, company team-building exercises ... hell, even just Friday night poker games or girls' nights out that need a little spice." Hartwell was obviously proud of his operation.

"But how do they set it up? And how do they find the secure side of your web operation?" asked Jack.

"You'd be surprised at how well word-of-mouth referral still works, even in the computer age," Hartwell explained. "Hell, especially in the computer age of social networking. We get our Associates through one system of referrals for recruiting--mainly coeds and young singles, or divorcées trying to earn some cash to make ends meet.

"But we even have some married professionals and even housewives who secretly peddle their asses either for the money or the kick, unbeknownst to their husbands or wives. Now, to be fair, we do have a few who do it with the full knowledge and permission of their spouses or long term partners--strange to me, but it seems to work for them.

"The customer for our special delivery service, on the other hand, logs on through a separate secure server system; selects his or her pizza first--we insist on that; then he or she selects which of our Delivery Talent Associates he or she desires for delivery; indicates if it is just for a delivery event of limited duration or if the Associate is available all night; selects the payment method--we take all forms of online payment, including PayPal; and then we schedule.

"Naturally, the request remains in contingency mode until the Associate or Associates are contacted from our Central Operations here in this or one of our other Regional Operational Centers. Once we have confirmed with the Associates, we schedule for security for the event and finalize the online charge and notify the customer by email. If the customer backs out after the event is scheduled, but before it actually occurs, all he or she pays is the setup fee; once the Delivery Talent Associate is in transit for the event, all monetary transactions are completed, regardless of whether the event is complete or not.

"For normal pizza delivery, we mostly use the ladies, with one of the guys along as driver and protector, so to speak. For the Pussy-Gram delivery, we have hired and trained security guys and gals to go along in case of trouble--anytime sex is involved, there is too much temptation for things to get carried away. And I don't want any harm to come to my ladies ... or my guys either."

Lee had pursed his lips and begun to shake his head side-to-side slightly about fifteen seconds before Hartwell finished his spiel. 'This is amazing, ' Lee thought. 'No wonder the cash flow was so large on what appeared to be a small-to-medium-scale pizza company. Like the man said, it really IS about more than just pizza.'

Saturday, late afternoon, the weekend before Spring Break--Brooke and Jeremy.

Melanie Vanderbeek shook hands with Ms. Margaret "Call me Peggy" Cornwall as the Sigma Lambda Tau team members, consisting of Jeremy, Brooke, Derek, and Melanie moved to vacant seats around the conference table here at the facility in Montpelier, but remained standing until introductions could be completed. Peggy Cornwall, a stylishly-dressed lady in her early thirties, smiled professionally and introduced the other people at the table, who looked to be in their mid-to-late twenties. They were meeting in a typical glass-and-steel office building in downtown Montpelier.

"Allow me to introduce Mark Truman, Joyce Duncan, and Gary Wright." Everyone at the table moved around in a somewhat uncoordinated dance of handshakes, smiles, and short vocal hellos before they all sat finally. Mark and Joyce helped themselves to ice water from a carafe that had been placed on a tray in the center of the table, along with tumblers. The others declined by default by not reaching for the carafe.

Peggy continued, "Melanie, we are so glad to see that you have returned to participate in this venue. Mr. Kitagami and his other trade team members spoke highly of your ... participation ... in their previous visit to Vermont last fall." Melanie smiled and nodded--Jeremy could have sworn he saw Melanie blush slightly as well. It looked like she had even lifted her chest out a few extra millimeters in a mild display of sexual excitement.

Peggy's eyes glanced around at the other Sigma Lambda Tau members before glancing down at the table as she continued, "I was sort of hoping that maybe ... Todd ... might be joining us again during these ... uh ... negotiations?" She looked up slyly at Melanie, who smiled and responded.

"I'm afraid that Todd is tied up with another engagement that conflicts with this one; and he is finishing up his requirements for graduation in a couple of months as well." Arching one eyebrow and glancing briefly at her other teammates, Melanie continued, "I'm sure that Jeremy, here, will MORE than meet your needs; and Derek, a junior this year, is a little farther along in his special training than Jeremy."