The Drudgery of Baking

            by James Barnett

 

Hi welcome to... What can I do for you today?...Is there anything else I can help you with?...would you like a ribbon on your box?.... These questions are what keep me in a state of constant aggravation and annoyance. There are very few ways to avoid these questions, and even fewer ways to avoid their responses.  There is simply no escaping menopausal women, the overweight middle aged patrons, and the unintelligible Asians that dominate the customer demographic.

 

I walked into the shop and groaned inwardly; this wasn't going to be an easy shift, the line was already stretching out of the door and showed no signs of slowing down anytime in the near future. I could already see the warning signs coming from some of the customers. The silver gray hair on the women wearing shawls was being swept back more often and more violently with each passing minute. The fatties were beginning to shift their weight more and more often as their impressive bulks dig into their Birkenstock's.  I shook my head and snaked my way through the crowd into the back where I quickly changed into my white polo shirt, threw on an apron and marched boldly outward to face the mob.

 

 It was then that I saw her; the sight almost made me turn and run back into the kitchen. A five foot tall, and six foot wide blob of a human.  Dressed in a spandex bodysuit of the purest turquoise she dominated my view, and that of all the other employees. I turned and looked around at the other people working and saw by the turned down faces hiding evil grins  that it would I who would have to face this gargantuan on my own. I took a deep breath, turned and smiled at her. “Hi welcome to... What can I do for you today?

“Cookies,” she breathed the word out as if they were ingrained into the very roots of her soul. “Cookies,” the way she said it I could almost see a light coming from around the cookie case, as some higher power were beckoning to her, calling to her to release those sugar and flour filled pastries from their glass enclosed cage.

“Sure, and how many would you like?” I looked at her skeptically as if unable to believe that I was actually witnessing this. My coworker caught this look and chortled to himself as he made yet another decaf soy chai latte for the politically correct of Berkeley.

“I'll need a box....a big one” no surprise there, I said to myself as I stooped down to pick up the largest box we carried, correctly surmising that she would want to try at least four of everything we were selling that day. As I staggered under the weight of 6 dozen cookies, and dreading the task of windexing the cookie case where her paws had attempted to break through the glass in order to acquire the grease faster I made my way to the register.

“Well lets see now, 72 cookies at fifty cents apiece brings us to thirty seven dollars even” I try  to always smile at the customer at the register, so that my face doesn't betray the fact that I think they are nuts for paying as much as they are, for something that in my opinion isn't worth the money. I tied a ribbon around the box not to make it more aesthetically pleasing but simply to keep the box from exploding on the way from the shop to her lavender Geo metro.

 

I sighed and turned around exhausted, not wanting to see another cookie as long as I lived when I heard it. The one sound nobody in customer service ever wants to hear, and when they do, wishes they could just turn and run. The slow nasal speech of an old Jewish woman.

“Excuse me young man, but I think that you have made a mistake with my order, this is not what I ordered, does this look like a coconut cake to you? Well, does it?” I never understood why people seem to think that if you talk like you are speaking to a retard of a five year old that you are going to get what you want from somebody even faster. I mean fucking with the people who handle your food is just never a good idea no matter what the problem is. Treat them politely, and maybe be a bit forceful, but don't treat us like imbeciles- bad things will happen. But anyway,

“I'm sorry ma'am, but that is the only cake that we're doing right now that has anything with coconut in it. I was the one who took your order and I know for a fact that this is the cake that you ordered from me.”

“No it is Not!!!!!  I specifically ordered a coconut cake, not a chocolate coconut cake, you did the cake I wanted for a friend of mine five years ago, and I wanted the same one today.!!!!” She was shrieking by now, and was running her hands through her hair like the world is going to end if she didn't get her cake in the next five minutes.

“Look, I'm sorry about the mix up but this is the only cake that we are doing that has any coconut in it. I'm happy to let you talk to the owner if that will make you feel any better.” It's funny how people can hear the same thing over and over and over again and still not understand that things are not going to magically change; simply because they are throwing a fit that would make a child who's being told no in a Toys R Us proud.

“Well what am I supposed to do now, I told people I would be serving a coconut cake at my dinner tonight and now I can't. My dinner is ruined!” Well if your entire dinner was planned around a cake that you didn't even make yourself, I'm sure nobody is really going to care what happens. I'm  positive your friends can't even tell the difference between our stuff and Sara Lee's, so I don't see what the problem is. Maybe It's more the issue that you haven't gotten laid in twelve years and the fact that you probably drove your husband to a premature death, than the mix up about our cake. How far off the mark am I?

               But of course I say none of this and instead I smile politely and suggest that she talk to the owner who would be more than happy to refund her money (which is a complete lie, they hold onto every dollar in that joint like it's their last), or maybe she would be interested in another type of cake. Either way I wash my hands of the old croan and slink into the back  to drown myself in the sink.

 

I look at the clock and see that I only have one more hour to go in my shift. Thank God, one more request for a pastry that we don't make and never have will have me out in front of the store with a twelve gage shotgun blasting anybody who comes within fifty feet of the front door.  I bend down to retrieve an Italian soda I had made for myself earlier in the day wondering why the owners kept buying the syrup for them. I mean the employees are the only ones who drink the stuff and even then rarely because it isn't even that great. Seriously I have seen everybody who walks in look at the bottles of syrup and never once have I been asked to make one of the damn things. And yet they must spend at least a hundred dollars a month ordering and reordering this crap. Anyway, as I was coolly sipping my drink watching the outside world pass me by it was then that I saw them. My most hated enemy, the one customer that no matter how hard I tried I could never escape. The Asian woman.

 

The thing about Asians is that they never travel alone, it's as if at birth someone beat the safety in numbers mantra into them until they bled. They come together in their designer clothing with their designer bags, and look for not the most delicious items but simply the prettiest and most expensive. They then leave leaving behind a wake of broken and tormented souls who have gone deaf trying to decipher the pigeon English that escapes their mouthes.  Roaring away in their luxury suv's.

 

I watch them approach with a sort of morbid curiosity, they are attempting to cross Shattuck, but seem unable to make any decision about when the right time to jay walk actually is. One of them seems determined to find a time when there are no cars for a mile in any direction, and another seems unwilling to cross the street at all. I laugh to my self, and go on about my business  knowing that soon  I will have to confront them, as we are the only shop on the street that could possibly have peaked their interest. As they walked I could already tell I had my work cut out for me, they weren't even speaking English, and their eyes sparkled with the thought of possessing such beautiful cakes.

“Hi, welcome to...”