Pizza Planet

Borderline sick today. Virus traveled from child to child to adult to other adult me, lodging in my throat, making it scratchy. Bad enough that I stayed home (Yuriko’s recovering, too), but not so bad that I didn’t listen in on a couple of in-house conference calls and check my e-mail a few times.

One message thoughtfully offered me material to publish, no charge (my italics):

“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

”Doctor's Orders for Living and Working Stress-Free:
How to Identify and Relieve Stress-Related Illnesses

“Everyone deals with stress at some point in their lives; some deal with it every day. Stress can be a factor at work or home, but when stress gets out of hand, it can not only have a negative psychological impact but can manifest itself physically. Research has shown that stress actually causes eighty to ninety percent of all illnesses. Think what that means for workplace productivity and profits!"

Come again? Eighty to ninety percent? If only the inhabitants of medieval Europe had known about modern stress relief, millions could have been saved from the Black Death, it seems.

Then there’s the matter of that last, breathless line. If employers, generally speaking, really believed that stress reduction would boost “productivity and profits,” they would, generally speaking, pay their workers better for less work, which would seem like a swell formula for stress reduction.

It’s too much to expect a lot of meaningful information in press releases like this, though they can be a good way of disseminating basic facts. The other day, I did an article on Domino’s Pizza, king of industrialized delivery pizza, and there was a document in the media section of the company web site claiming that the chain delivers a million pizzas a day, worldwide. (That would be about 130 pizzas per day per store, so it’s plausible.) Even if the figure’s not precisely accurate, it’s still a meaty statistic, almost literally.

Imagine a million pizzas laid out in some flat place, maybe one of the Salt Flats. A remarkable vista of tomatoes, bread and cheese. Until, that is, you had to figure out how to escape from the pizza plain. As you crossed it, the pizza-ground-mush would probably become as sticky as mud, and enlivened by hordes of insects and animals coming to feast. So it’s just as well, then, that Domino’s delivers its million daily products individually, or at least in small numbers.