What Makes a Snowbaroo

Chapter Eleven - The Pizza Ignoramuses

So, I left off with the whole Darebus thing, told you it was important, and now am about to tell you otherwise. Things move fast in the world of automotives, so here we go.

See, the thing you missed with PodunkWorks from the last episode is that they're the guys who outfit jets with all sorts of cool gear and fly them into remote areas for firefighting and aerial refueling and cargo stuff and all that. George got Snowbaroo on the line, since we were the beta testers for the Darebus sales force anyhow, and decided to relinquish sales to the point of Snowbaroo being the manufacturer, and PodunkWorks being the destination and outfitter and dealer. Since Darebus needed Podunk's market, it all made sense. So, George called off the whole thing. I didn't need to become a pilot, but Wil, Orv, and Alex were set to finish their training anyhow. Who knew, maybe they'd pick up a side hustle? I mean, Alex was already at Snowbaroo nearly full-time, and she also coached the high school's soccer teams, and the brothers were hard at work with the service department. How much more time did they have?

George had also called construction off just in the nick of time to halt construction of the two hangars they were going to store the A320 and A330 "for show" models; now it was just a large plot of levelled dirt. Ben refused to park a single car on it, even the Base trim models. The stalemate was supposed to be broken by a meeting we'd had the day after the paperwork went through with PodunkWorks, but all Alex kept insisting we do with it was lay down a patch of turf and use it as a soccer field. Wil and Orv wanted to use it as a test field for their hovering car projects – they'd already figured out the Jealousy hovering mechanism, but they wanted to expand to the Crossback and TRX next.

For my part, I said we should lay down a slab of concrete and make it a certified pre-owned lot, but like I said, George would never sell a used car unless it was a Snowbaroo and previously leased. Frederick did agree with my idea, but he also suggested we make it another office space, so we store our stuff somewhere and move that old paperwork and the pallets of old and new brochures somewhere while we waited for someone to have enough time to sort them out.

The idea was still in the works, although George created a "suggestions" box for us to use about the issue. I think Alex just wrote "soccer pitch" on a stack of fifty post-it notes and slipped them inside. Ben, whose idea it was to create a private golf course where he could try to get more of the big businesses that needed bulk cheap Impastas, probably had the most leverage among us. At that point the whole thing was stalled, leaving us with a big patch of dirt. The brothers, Wil and Orv, were quite happy with that; they didn't need anything fancy for testing, and so they quickly turned it into an interim practice space for their hovering Crossback.

I won't get into the Crossback again, but I'd sold a few since the spring. It was, oddly enough, our most popular model.

Now, attention got abruptly turned to two facts. One, the TRX was floundering. Two, I needed to convince my coworkers that pizza was awesome.

You all know by now that I used to be a pizza delivery kid. Or at least, I hope you do. I drove a '13 Impasta for a few months to rack up that money that I ended up blowing on the so-called "Injector Gadget," my newly beloved 2011 Lexus LS 460. So that's all to say, pizza was tied to me in a way.

Plus I love to eat it, as does ninety-something percent of the rest of the United States. Unlike, I should note, my coworkers.

The only time I'd ever seen Isaac eat pizza was by necessity, that night he, Nathan, and I went to that field to try and whip my nonexistent soccer skills into shape. Otherwise, he ate tons of bread, forgot to eat at all, or just had vegetable stuff.

George only ate fish, pancakes (in alarming volumes), and red meat.

Ben went for steak, burgers, and soups, so he was sort of similar to George; they got along well at big luncheons like that.