Cake by the ocean

I just completed my Masters in Mathematics. I thought that it was a ripe time to explore something new and vastly unrelated to math. So I took a job at a bakery in a high end grocery store. And I quit within two weeks.

There were two major factors due to which I quit, apart from me being completely drained out:

Food wastage: This quite enraged me. In the few days that I have worked there, I am guilty of dumping a LOT of food in the trash. To their credit, the people at the bakery have come up with novel ways to recycle food so that they may have another chance to sell it or get it consumed. Yet, on a daily basis, I have watched at least one cake, several breads, and about 4-5 breakfast items go into the bin. There is a donation truck that comes only once a week, and the employees are not permitted to go distribute the food. The breakfast items are not stale (in fact, most of the bakery items last for a few days after the printed expiry date), they are baked fresh everyday. Yet they are thrown due to insufficient quantity being present to pack them. For example, the muffins are sold in packs of six. If you had only four left at the end of the day, then you would have to throw them out. Not 30 minutes away from the store is a street filled with homeless and hungry people whose lives could be changed with that food. I can understand that the grocery might not want them lining up outside the store for free food(which in itself is atrocious), but I think they make sufficient profits so as to be able to hire a person who can go distribute the food. I think most employees would be glad to do that. But apparently that is against the company policy. They would rather have the desperate scramble in bins. Yet again, this proves that having a big pocket does not imply having a heart, and that education does not imply knowledge.

The music: I simply cannot fathom how people tolerate standing in that boombox for several hours at a stretch. It seemed like a rule that one can use at most two distinct notes in a song. I thought it was just my ears that bled, when I heard a coworker whine about it too. Maybe this is the management’s tactic to get their employees to take short breaks, because the music is louder in the staff room. Ever since, I have noticed that, the fancier(or more exclusive) a store, the weirder the music.

These were two of my major concerns. This place was not very hygienic. The baking trays have not been cleaned in ages (generally, baking at high temperatures kills most germs). The walls are a museum of chocolate. The knives and scrapers are not actually cleaned with soap, but with a high speed water jet. Another disappointment was that most of the baked goods were actually just baked from pre-frozen products. The only things baked fresh were pies and pepperoni sticks. Every time I watched the buckets of sugar syrup put into a pie, I lost my appetite. On the other hand, this really helped me get over my sugar addiction(*typing this while munching on a cookie bought from another store*).

My manager was a big inspiration. She is a very kind person who manages to smile through all situations, and get work done. She has Stage III breast cancer. Whenever I asked her how she felt, she would shrug her shoulders, say, “I try not to think about it”, and get back to work. Unlike the protagonists of all the cancer-related films I have seen, who live the rest of their life a happy person without a care in the world, she lives in reality – where she must work to feed her child, irrespective of the pain and suffering her body goes through. This is what cancer looks like to me – a rose in a desert. It is her charisma (and the occasional cookie she baked for me) that kept me there for as long as two weeks. It is also her that inspired me to quit in as short as two weeks. One can never say when illness can come knocking at your doorstep, but the more I see, the more I realize that we can, in fact, to some extent, control when it comes. By living a healthy lifestyle, both physically and mentally. The more pressure we put on ourselves, the more prone we are to falling sick. This job required me to be ready to gallivant continuously from 6:30 am for a minimum of 5 hours. Immediately after completing my Masters, my body was not ready for this torture. Keeping this job meant excessively straining myself, while leaving it meant denting my pride. It was a huge blow – one that I shall not forget in a while, but also one that I don’t regret.

Despite all this, I must admit that my short lived romance with the breads was a sweet ride. I learnt about a plethora of breads and buns that I never even knew existed, and how to slice them. I loved the symmetry and the patterns on the breads. I learnt to be punctual, orderly and a customers delight, irrespective of my inner turmoil. I baked my first cookie and iced my first cake. I learnt the importance of neatly presented products. Most importantly, I learnt that drops indeed do form the ocean. No matter how small the task or how subordinate the person, callousness on any individuals part can cause mammoth losses to the company.

In conclusion, this has indeed been an enlightening experience for me. This was my first job outside academia. As a teaching assistant, I am only supposed to use my brains. As a bakery worker, I am supposed to use my brains and muscles while exercising excellent communication skills. That is indeed a handful for the amount of pay. Thus, this job has increased my respect for what I do. Would I ever consider working outside academia again? The devil inside me laughs. Muahahahaha! Adventure awaits!