• Getting up at 4.30am (or earlier) never gets any easier!
• The fact you’ve been up since the crack of dawn working your ass off is never appreciated by customers.
• Managers control the quantity of bread/burger buns/doughnuts etc. that are made, not bakers. Please direct your complaints and abuse to management or customer service.
• “You don’t have any french sticks, go and make some more!” Oh, excuse me madam, just let me whip some up. Will you be back in the 2-3 hours it takes to turn flour into bread? Me neither! I’ve been here since 5am and finish in 10 minutes, which I’m now spending being shouted at by you.
• “Sunny weather this weekend? I’ll wait until the last-minute to go food shopping. No-one else will think to have a BBQ today… Why’s that baker running around sweating & looking like she’s gonna pass out?” Because I can’t keep up with you poor planners! Of course the shelves are empty, the whole town always decides its BBQ weather when the sun comes out! Endless supplies of bread do not appear out of thin air! We’ve been baking days in advance and have still been wiped out, what do you expect at 6pm on a beautifully sunny Saturday? Direct your yelling elsewhere please.
• Bakery equipment constantly breaks down on a weekly basis, it’s a nightmare! Ever tried hand moulding 30x loaves of each of 10x different types and sizes of bread?? I’m glad I used to stick to the burger rolls and doughnuts! My poor fellow bakers were/are amazing and talented bakers! They’ve had to learn to cope with whatever’s thrown at them, and they do! Absolute stars!
• DON’T FORGET THE YEAST!!! Discovering that mistake an hour and 60 still flat doughy loaves later is enough to make a grown man cry!
• Being a baker, is a job that comes with health risks. Major back problems and “Baker’s Asthma”, not to mention the mental stress, are just some of the health problems you’ll be looking forward to when you sign up.
• You want to be a baker because you love being creative and being appreciated for the effort you’ve put in? Go somewhere small and specialised. Don’t work in a supermarket bakery, you might as well work on an assembly line. They want quantity not quality.
• Hot cross buns are sent by the devil, not Jesus. Do you know what a pain those buggers are to make!?! I am eternally branded for life thanks to a burning accident involving those dreaded hot cross buggers! *Not biased, honest! *cough*
• Burns can get infected, THEY HURT! They scar! They are also a regular danger of the job. See my lovely swollen, gooey, infected arm from 2012 below, and how it looks 6 years later. Hot cross buns and burns are evil! Evil I tells ya!
  
  

  

  

There are positive sides to it all I must confess. There have to be or you wouldn’t do it!

• Firstly, bakery staff are some of the most fun, hard working and resilient people I’ve ever met. There are in-house squabbles like any job, but it always comes down to teamwork in the end.
• Seeing the shelves full of your hard work and speaking to happy customers can make you feel proud.
• Knowing you’ve made a delicious product that makes people happy, and that you can take home to your family… Well sometimes that did give me the fuzzy feelings. Sometimes a long hard day is worth it in the end.
• I made the best cheese baps in town, no-one can take that away from me!! ?

I certainly don’t miss getting up at 4.30am on a Sunday though! HA!!