Cheesy Cyberspace Innovations

At the risk of venturing further into nerd-dom, I ordered pizza online today. This was a first for me, and I admit it was slightly cooler than I expected. Chances are it wouldn’t have happened if not for the fact that I haven’t gone grocery shopping for a few weeks and didn’t much feel like Ramen Noodles. Anyway, I always figured ordering pizza online was extremely pointless, especially if you have a dial-up connection (which, fortunately, I do not). It seems it would take just as long to sign-in and click through all the screens as it would to make an old-fashioned phone call, perhaps even longer. I still hold to this fact, but little did I know there are a couple of minor perks to the cyber version of Pizza Hut. For starters, if you do not have any coupons, they abound on the website, and you need not print them off to use them. On the other hand, for those of us who devote an entire kitchen drawer to the last six months of pizza ads that have come to our mailbox, we can now free up a lot of space. A second benefit is that, if you are fairly consistent in your pizza pie preferences, you can quickly and easily order the same thing you ordered last time, without punching it all in again (so the site claims). But perhaps the most innovative aspect of cyberpizza is that you can place your orders up to seven days ahead of time, including the approximate time you want the food delivered. While this may not be the most utilized feature, it could be cool, say, for those planning a pizza party. Or, in the rare instance that you have Internet access but not a cellular phone, you could order a pizza to be delivered (or picked-up) three hours from now, then go out and run a bunch of errands, knowing your pizza will be ready when you are. Perhaps this is something you could do by phone as well, but for those who appreciate the society-dissolving anonymity and silence of the Internet, as well as the heightened prospect of carpal tunnel and blindness, you can now order a high-fat, high-carb pizza without lifting your buttocks from the confines of your cushy swivel chair. Mmm mmm good!