Turns out there is a very good reason for those pizza tables

When you're a kid, ordering pizza is its own kind of holiday. Not only do you get to eat something delicious—if you, too, have an active imagination—you also get a free toy: the pizza table. As it turns out though, those doll-sized plastic objects not only serve an important function and have an interesting history, they also have a real name (other than pizza table), as The Huffington Post reports.

Getting hungry yet? You have a lot of types of pizza to choose from:

The "pizza saver," as the pizza table is officially known, plays a crucial role in keeping your pizza pretty. Its height and center positioning prevent pizza box lids from drooping, which was a real problem before their invention in 1985. Prior to that time, ordering pizza meant you ran the risk of receiving a pie with the cheese and toppings stuck on the lid. But one woman, a true hero named Carmela Vitale—as Gizmodo points out—solved this pizza problem by dreaming up this mini tripod, which she smartly filed a patent for in 1983 and received two years later. Now, a pizza saver ensures that your pizza cheese and toppings stay where they belong—on your pie—when it's delivered to you.

If you're lucky enough to never have experienced this problem, one quick Twitter search for pizza fails reveals that it's still an ongoing issue for places that have yet to adopt the genius invention.

So thanks to Vitale for making our lives more pizza perfect and, thereby, more productive.

Speaking of pizza, remember that time Ellen had pies delivered to the Oscars? What a gem!