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For Pizza Café's employee of decade, Down Syndrome takes backseat to fun, work
By VINCE DEVLIN of the Missoulian | Posted: Saturday, May 15, 2010 10:21 pm |
We’ve all heard of the employee of the month. And even the employee of the year. But Sandra Mary Brickzin of Ronan will be honored Sunday as the Pizza Cafe’s employee of the decade. Photo by MICHAEL GALLACHER/Missoulian
RONAN - Today is Sandra's day.
It's been 10 years in the making.
Through it all she has bused tables, washed dishes, served sodas, vacuumed floors and kept her boss, Pizza Café owner Burton Cannon, in stitches.
"You've been driving me crazy for 10 years," he'll tell her.
"Oh, yeah?" she'll fire back. "Maybe you should go on Letterman and tell your jokes."
He calls her "the old battle ax." She calls him "the old goat."
"She cracks me up," Cannon says. "I absolutely love her. We'll get to laughing so hard I get worried she's going to cut her air off."
And that is a concern. Twice in these 10 years, Sandra Mary Brickzin has passed out at work.
"She has trouble with her esophagus," Cannon explains. "Both times I hollered, ‘Call 9-1-1!' and both times, EMTs were sitting in the restaurant eating lunch. They were with her in two seconds, and had her in the hospital within five minutes."
And both times, as she was being wheeled out on a stretcher to the ambulance, Sandra cried out to Cannon, "Burt, I'm so sorry. Please don't fire me, Burt, please!"
Fire her? Good grief. Who's going to fire the Pizza Café's employee of the decade?
******
Cannon opened the Pizza Café on April 1, 2000. A month later a group from Mission Mountain Enterprises - which provides services to people with intellectual disabilities - was having lunch there.
"They asked if I'd be willing to hire any of their kids," Cannon says. "They said they had someone who was working at Plum Creek mopping floors but really didn't like it there. They said they thought she'd make a wonderful dishwasher, and I hired her on the spot."
Cannon says it turned out Brickzin, who was born with Down syndrome, had once worked as a dishwasher in the same building when it housed a previous restaurant, and had been fired from that job.
"But it's about more than doing dishes," he says. "Just having her here is the payoff."
Her smile is priceless, and she takes her duties seriously.
"I like to vacuum," Sandra says, and bookkeeper and waitress Dara Rodda says the staff knows it.
"There's hell to pay if the vacuum isn't plugged in when Sandra gets to work," she says. "I always tell her if she likes to vacuum, she should come to my house. But we all love working with Sandra - she's such a great gal, just awesome."
Health problems have cut her back to just a couple of days a week, a couple of hours at a time.
"But their jobs are so important to them," says Cannon, who has employed half a dozen people from Mission Mountain Enterprises over the years, including a 48-year-old man who washes dishes for him now. "They're so appreciative of having a job, and that's not always true of all your employees."
*******
"Boys are neat, and girls have stinky feet," Cannon will tell Sandra, which always produces an indignant "No, sir!" and a correction to which gender's feet smell.
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Friday Focus on Down Syndrome - Sandra Mary Brickzin
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