Working in a bakery sucks. Despite the propaganda fed to the public by Fred the Donut maker.
Over the summer, I was fortuitous enough to be hired to work in a supermarket bakery. For a good many years now I had entertained thoughts of becoming some sort of pastry magician, able to create delicate, buttery, and altogether sensuous croissants with a wave of my whisk, all the while maintaining my saucy, quasi-French accent. However, as it came to pass, I was sorely mistaken as to my own culinary abilities and also mistaken as to the exact duties of a “bakery assistant,” the position for which I was hired. I arrived on the first day, chipmunk peppy, and ready to kick some batter ass. My excruciatingly corpulent supervisor politely informed me that I would in fact “be doing none of that sh**,” and that instead my main raison d’etre in the bakery was to stack various frozen goods onto “trays,” and then to put these “trays” onto “racks.” This may seem like a simple task to the casual reader, but I may assure you that it is not as "C'mon, a freaking monkey could do that" easy as it sounds. The trays were consistently caked with a substance similar in texture and smell to that of highway tar (maybe just a touch grittier), and could only be liberated from their noir-ish cauls by a process involving a knife-like tool, just as razor sharp as Pauly Shore’s wit, and approximately 50,000 burned calories of applied scrubbing and cutting on my part. Needless to say, I was not terribly amused by my position. And yet, as I think back, I remember how innocent I was in those first few days, so naïve, so unmolested, and so delightfully unexposed. Apparently I had been doing such a good job with “tray-up,” as it was referred to, that my slightly-less-than-Neolithic-brained flour guru boss, Jack, decided to let me work the front counter as well. This would entail dropping everything that I was working on and sprinting to the other side of the bakery whenever the tiny little office bell happened to ring. I was pleased that I would finally get to “work the crowd.” Jack must have noticed the excitement etched on my face, because he suddenly developed a smirk vaguely reminiscent to that of Skeletor’s, (from the Masters of the Universe, for the Mattel unenlightened. Duh? He-man!) but just a tad less benevolent. “This isn’t gonna be a time for goofin’ around. You do what they say, and do it fastly, or they’ll get ornery,” he pronounced, sort of. Despite the shocking and blatant disregard for any grammatical rules whatsoever, Jack’s speech had instilled in me a deep and abiding sense of dread, which I soon discovered was not unfounded.
The first day I worked the front, I encountered an intriguing and unfortunately ineluctable anomaly: really, really disgustingly ugly people live near me. Now, some of you out there might be thinking, “Yeah, right, what a puss. How ugly could they be?” HA! Count your lucky twinkies that you have never met any of these people, because they will scar you, deeply. I’ll give one example, my favorite--in that she was the least offensive of the offensive. This woman came to the bakery one day and proceeded to ring the bell about 16 times, so before I even saw her, I hated her. I turned the corner, only to be greeted by what appeared to be a shaved bear, with something looking like an agitated gerbil stuck under its nose. After recovering from my initial seizure, I charged up as close to the counter as I could tolerate, and inquired as to how I could help it. She said, in a voice dripping with baritone and which I half suspect was produced by a Rottweiler lodged in her trachea, that she would certainly enjoy a pound of cookies. Now here’s the scary part. When I had produced the requisite 16 ounces of sucrose-imbued starch, she accepted them readily, and displayed her teeth in a smile I shall never forget, no matter the quantity of Valium ingested. This woman had nigh on 6 teeth left, all of them blacker than the blackest Black Panther. I promptly fainted dead away.
And after that, all I remember is waking up on my bed at home, bathed in sweat and shivering like a newly born puppy. I quit the next day.
Epilogue: To all who read this, take it as a cautionary tale. Pass it on to your co-workers and your kids (legitimate and otherwise) and your pets. Ugliness is not to be taken lightly. Use precaution when handling ugly people, especially old ones, as they are contagious. This has been a parable paid for by the United Way.
