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Football season: time to pull out the pizza-delivery menus that have been stored in the pantry since last January.

I ordered my first pie of the season this past Sunday night - the new "Sicilian Meats" pizza from Papa John's. This bomb has four meats: pepperoni, salami, linguica sausage and Italian sausage. I'd never heard of linguica sausage before, and I really didn't know the difference between pepperoni and salami.

Salami is a category of air-dried, fermented sausage made from the ground muscle meat of pork or beef with a mixture of added fat. It is generally cured with mild seasonings and tightly packed into a casing.

Different variations of salami, like Genoa and Cotto, use different peppercorns and spices. Pepperoni is simply a hard, narrow type of spicy salami that is strongly seasoned and served in thin slices.

Linguica sausage (pronounced lin-gwee-sah) is a smoked, Portuguese-type sausage made from coarsely ground pork butts. It is seasoned with garlic, cinnamon, pepper, salt and cumin seeds and then cured in a vinegar pickling liquid before being stuffed into a casing.

Italian sausage refers to a wide variety of fresh, usually uncooked, sausages that are seasoned with garlic and fennel.

Whenever I call a pizza place - any pizza place - I never get a voice-recording that prompts me through a maze of questions and keystrokes. I always get a real, live person immediately.

I called my credit union the other day, because I wanted to find out how much longer it was going to take to receive my new check-debit card that was supposedly mailed out on Sept. 14 to replace the one I accidentally threw away.

After navigating patiently through the automated call-routing system, I was told I could remain on the line or press "2" and hang up, and an agent would call me back without losing my place. How great, I thought. Well, not exactly. It took almost 15 minutes to speak to someone about where by debit card was.

This new "customer service" gimmick gives the initial impression there is a higher level of customer care. Actually, the company has simply found a way to call you back at its convenience, not when it's convenient for you to talk.

"Seven to ten business days," I was finally told.

"But it's been two weeks," I replied.

"We count business days, sir, not the weekends," was the response.

Does my credit union use a different postal service than I do? And why don't they count Saturday, because the mail is delivered that day? And where in the heck did they mail my card from?

But more importantly, I'd like to know why my credit union makes a lot more money off me than the pizza joint does in one year and why some kid at the pizza parlor answers the phone every time I call to place a $12 order.