Main Character of the Week is a weekly column that tells you the most prominent “main character” online (good or bad). It runs on Fridays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is heartwarming, like Kevin Bacon making a TikTok about his twin flame; usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s the Little Caesars manager who stood up to a customer.
The cult classic Office Space turns 25 this year.
At the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas this week, the cast (minus Jennifer Aniston) reunited to discuss the epic anti-work movie from the late ‘90s. It was a box office bomb when it opened but by 2001 was one of the most rented videos on the industry charts— right up there with Lord Of the Rings, writer-director Mike Judge told attendees.
I think this is because the movie, beyond its dark humor and resonant politics, is an escapist fantasy.
We all as workers serve someone. At some point we will resent them. But when we serve dozens of daily customers, it’s a different level of bubbling volatility.
So in this culture-shifting TikTok, a Little Caesars manager didn’t back down to keep the peace. She boldly broke the fourth wall and effectively told the viral patron who filmed on his phone like a coward that her pizza just made him sick. She didn’t care.
In a follow-up TikTok, she said that she was a 43-year-old single mother of 3 kids and several cats and a small circle of friends. She was not going to stress about Little Caesars corporate, despite running one.
It’s a powerful position to take that is also brave given the stakes. And according to most of the audience commenters who saw the original video, she was in the right.
There are two sides to every story. However, the facts certainly make it seem as if the customer intended to scare her into free food by threatening food poisoning. She said he had confronted her for 15 minutes prior to filming her.
The disease that he accused her of contracting the same day that he ate the Little Caesars generally has a 4-day incubation period, according to the World Health Organization.
Like Peter, the Office Space protagonist, our Main Character Of The Week is a hero who would not choose what is easy in the name of decorum and short-term peace.
She’s not just the main character of the week, either. This manager is one of the few role models I can remember writing about in the six months we’ve been doing this column.
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