"Educate yourself more or find a job," Robles said. Robles said he had to choose to live as normal of a life as possible and encourages anyone else with a disability to not let it hinder them. "Ricky chose to say, 'I've got more fight in me.' " "I love it that he chooses to work," Portillo said. Portillo applauds Robles and his willingness to work hard, despite his disability. Robles said he has no plans of retiring in the near future, and Portillo told him if he did retire, "we'll go to your house and get you." You just fold them up and put them in stacks of 10." The boxes are pre-cut so you can feel the crease in your hand. "That was just pizza boxes, that's not including the other boxes," Robles said. The most pizza boxes Robles can recall folding in one week was about 7,400 during Domino's 50 percent off pizza sale.
#Dominos lubbock 50th st drivers
It lets all of our drivers focus on taking deliveries and lets our insiders focus on making pizzas and we have Ricky making sure we still operate." "He would fold boxes and our entire cabinet would be full.
"If I didn't have Ricky, I'd have to have five drivers to keep up with it," Brian Ganus, a Domino's supervisor, said. Robles said there's not a trick to the trade of folding boxes, but his superiors would argue that no one in Lubbock's Domino's staff can fold boxes as fast as Robles. They look after me - if I do have trouble with something they spot me and help me out." Working with the employees, they've been great. "At first I started working 20 hours a week, now I'm up to pretty close to 40 hours. He may be in the back lines, but he's vital to our operations."Īlong with folding boxes, Robles helps with prepping food, cleaning and unloading supply trucks. "The volume that we do is so intense that my staff could not keep up with folding the amount of boxes that Ricky does. "We count on him to be here," Portillo said. Victor Portillo, Domino's Lubbock operations director, said once Robles was hired he became indispensable. I started taking courses and I asked them if I could possibly get employment somewhere. "I went to a Braille school at the (Texas) Commission for the Blind. "I told my wife, 'I don't want to stay home just me by myself and the dog,' " Robles said. Though Robles also suffered from depression after losing his vision, he said he had to get back in the workforce. "You have to qualify with a pistol, an R-22 and an 18-guage - I just couldn't do it anymore." "I was having trouble qualifying," he said. "Now, both of my eyes are gone."Īt the time, Robles worked as a staff sergeant for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, but was let go after his vision began to fail. "After that I couldn't see stuff that I used to see," Robles said. Robles' doctor told him his eye pressure was at 80 mmHg. Eye pressure above 20 mmHg is considered suspicious and may be a sign of the development of glaucoma. Normal eye pressure is anywhere from 10 to 20 millimeters of mercury, according to the AGS. I went back to the house and said to my wife, 'There's something wrong.' " "I got out of my car and went to look for it - sure enough it was there. "I always look at that stop sign, but when I got to it I couldn't see it anymore," he said. Robles said one day he noticed he could not see the stop sign down the street from his driveway. The incurable disease leads to blindness caused by damage from high eye pressure to the nerve that connects the eye to the brain, according to the American Glaucoma Society. He was hired by Domino's a few years after being diagnosed with glaucoma at the age of 43. It takes about four or five Domino's Pizza delivery drivers to fold hundreds of pizza boxes, but Ricky Robles, 59, can do that same amount on his own without his vision.įor the past 11 years, Robles has spent three to five days out of the week with his hands stained in blue ink from folding pizza boxes at the Lubbock Domino's locations at 2510 Marsha Sharp Freeway and 5407 Fourth St.
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