After eight failed attempts to reach Senator Orrin Hatch’s office by phone, Utah resident Julia Silge realized she needed a more-creative way to complain about Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s pick to be Education secretary. So this past week, she found a Washington, D.C., pizzeria on GrubHub, ordered a Hawaiian pie (“a divisive, controversial choice, much like Betsy DeVos”), entered Hatch’s office as the delivery address, and attached a special message:
It was a “snap” decision Silge admits was “out of character” for her, but the ploy looked pretty promising at first:
As she learned pretty fast, though, federal buildings these days treat the unexpected arrival of random food more or less how they’d treat an envelope of anthrax:
“I definitely had a sinking feeling in my stomach,” she tells the Salt Lake Tribune. “At this point, I’m starting to realize this was maybe not my best thought-out plan.”
But her tweets started getting attention, enough to get on the Rachel Maddow Show, and Hatch’s office eventually heard the story. His staff tells the Tribune an “unprecedented number” of constituents have been trying to contact them since Trump’s term began, so it’s gotten almost impossible to keep robocalls from clogging up his phone lines.
They did applaud Silge’s ingenuity, even if it didn’t stop Hatch from voting for DeVos anyways: “We appreciate all creative efforts to reach Senator Hatch, particularly as we deal with a large volume of out-of-state callers that are preventing Utah constituents from reaching us,” his staff said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the pizza did not make it through security screening because the office had not ordered it.”
