I hate math homework. I’m really bad at it and last Saturday I was forced to do it all day and into the night. (When I say “forced” I mean I waited until the day the online assignments and an online test were due.)

But when all was said and done, I finished my homework, got a B on my test and decided that I deserved to treat myself with a bad movie and some good food. The movie was “The Faculty,” a gem from 1998 where aliens invade a high school and, spoiler alert, Josh Hartnett and Elijah Wood (their characters, anyway) basically save the school, the town and mankind.

Before I started the movie I placed an order through the Papa John’s website for a medium pizza with four toppings (I had gotten paid that day so I was splurging). I assumed my pizza would show up in roughly 30 minutes, so I just waited with my money while watching Jon Stewart’s character go from a down-to-earth science teacher to a foaming-at-the-eye alien. It made me really miss the days when he acted in films, and it made me miss my pizza too — shouldn’t it have been delivered to my apartment by now?

I checked my bank account, and I’d been charged for it, but then I checked my inbox, and I never got the confirmation email. So I called the local Papa John’s only to find out that I was the fourth person to call about this, and there was a glitch in their system, so my order never got relayed to the store that would’ve been making my pizza  — cue the first world problem that is me starving for my missing Papa John’s, when there is other perfectly edible food in my apartment.

I was put on hold until the manager could talk with me, not because I demanded it, but because I guess that’s just how they were doing it. He explained what happened, helped me place my order for real and apologized and promised I wouldn’t get charged twice.

Twenty minutes later I had the pizza I ordered and ultimately my bank account was only charged for the one. But that didn’t stop me from telling everyone at the Vidette the next day about the tragic loss of my original Papa John’s order and me having to wait an hour or so to finally enjoy the four-topping masterpiece.

Tuesday morning I opened my email to see that I got one from Papa John’s, apologizing for the inconvenience and giving me a code for a free, large, three-topping pizza. Oh, yes. Food, plus it being free, leads to an extremely happy college student in most cases and this was no exception.

So, from there I told everyone about how great Papa John’s was for giving me a free pizza that would have cost even more than the one I ordered in the first place.

Now, Papa John’s is a huge pizza chain, so one pizza to one girl in central Illinois probably isn’t a giant setback for it, but even more so, this is going to benefit Papa John’s and just goes to show that good customer service pays off. Not only did I tell my Twitter followers about the free pizza offer (like I’m Kim Kardashian and what I tweet reaches a lot of people … 155 followers), but after cashing in my free pizza on Sunday I decided that it might be the subject of my column. I mean, Papa John’s basically gave me four or five free meals, the least I can do is give them some well-deserved free press, even if they don’t need it.

Word of mouth is one of the best ways for information to travel and the same is true of this information. To whoever is reading this, order Papa John’s or don’t, but maybe something to take away from my experience is that it’s important to treat people right, be it your customers or just passersbys; you never know how it could pay off. Hey, they might even write a column about you.