Gong Show

My work has been a Gong Show this week.

First off I'm working 8 days in a row. In a row! What the hell who thought that was a good idea? Secondly it has been an interesting week where I'm constantly wondering if I'll be going home soon.

At the start of the week we ran out of yeast. That's right yeast, the stuff that makes bread go. That's almost as bad as a bakery out of flour... oh wait that happened later that day. So at the very start of the day as I mixed the second dough of over a dozen I realised there was no more yeast in the cooler. So there I was at 3:30 in the morning, out of yeast, and with one other person working who is constantly offended by the lack of management.

No seriously, she gets upset when someone says something that contridicts something she was already told, or when screw ups like running out of yeast happen. The last few days I've arrived at the store and knocked to be let in she seemed miffed at me for not being giving a key yet.

Anyway I made the wise executive decision to stretch what little yeast I had to make all of the smaller doughs that use very little of it and are normally made later in the day. Of course that ment we didn't have any white, whole wheat, or sweet dough but what can you do?

Later in the morning the assistant manager came in an hour late after we had spent the better part of the day cleaning and wondering what to do next. He took off right away to try and track down some live yeast, which he did in under an hour and we were able to get a few of the important doughs made. In doing so we used every last kilogram of flour we had left. However at the end of the production day the long overdue order arrived and replenished our supplies.

Oh that reminds me of a few days before, where again right off the bat in the morning Arden and I realised that there was a huge order of buns being picked up before noon and it wasn't a part of our first or second run productions. Good times. Naturally Arden was pissed. I on the other hand was glad we caught the mistake when we did because I could still update the spreadsheet and reweigh out the dough ingredients. So we saved the day and nobody seemed to care or notice.

Now today was another fun day. I was in the middle of mixing a dough when the mixer broke. Apparently this had happened before on a day I wasn't there and they had to call a repair guy. Same thing today. It had blown an internal fuse (which I now know how to change if it happens again) and so it wouldn't do much of anything expect trip the building fuse it's hooked into. So while we waited for this guy to come fix it I got to "hand mix" the 15 kilogram blob of dough still in the mixing bowl. Wow is that alot of work.

So I'm already ridiculously tired from my long work week and now I have to knead a piece of half mixed dough for 15 minutes. If you want sore hands and wrists that's the way to do it. After I was finished and I could un-hunch from leaning over the bowl I was really light headed and sweaty. I sort of stumbled around as I cut up the dough without any help from my manager. I was pretty surprised nobody considered my well being after doing that. There was even a guy from the coast there doing a hands on inspection and he didn't seem to notice that I was swaying a touch. *sigh*

I really feel that my judgement is far superior to my manager's I just doing have any baking experience to rely on.