Earning the Comma

Whew. I ended up working more than 36 hours in the past three days--hey, maybe another comma next week!

Yesterday was nuts, and it wasn't as crazed for me as it was for Bossman. I got there a little before 6:30. I pounded my butter; made two signs for the store regarding our Valentine's Day cakes; wrote up two invoices for orders; assembled and boxed 220 mini fruit tarts (a quarter of a strawberry (sliced), a mandarin orange slice, and a half a blackberry, on top of a squirt of pastry cream); cut up my dough and found eight slots in the reach-in freezer for it (the latter being an exercise in rearrangement and space management); smeared chocolate on 220 mini rum balls so they could be coated in sprinkles; laminated my dough (beginning a little after noon; usually I start around 9:30); shaped two small pieces of dough into mini chocolate and mini plain, for BT's place; put tomorrow's croissants on sheet pans for baking (to clear out space in the freezers for the new croissants I had to shape); and then shaped the rest of the laminated dough, which included three pieces of chocolate (54 croissants per piece), three pieces of plain (74 croissants per piece), another piece of mini chocolate, and two pieces of curved croissants, which are laminated with this margarine shit rather than butter (64 croissants per piece--and we don't sell these in these in the store; they're for a wholesale customer who wants something soft enough to use for sandwiches).

I also made Bossman take pictures of the mini wedding cakes that Andi decorated (I've really been harassing him to take more pics of stuff). Bossman was just happy that Andie came in today (as was I): she was working with us in the fall, and now she just comes in on Saturday to do cakes with Johnnie, but Bossman thought she was working a chocolate event today and not coming in. The cakes took her several hours to do--and she's pretty fast as well as quite good--and Bossman couldn't have done it a lot quicker. Meanwhile, he had to do a wedding cake and all kinds of other shit. He got in well before I did and he was getting ready to leave about when I was--and he ended up missing the picture-taking for his youngest daughter's formal dance tonight, not least because someone's kid's birthday cake got screwed up--twice! The first time he had to fix it because the wrong picture was on top. Ten minutes later, the cake is back--it had slid in the box and smushed against the side. He redid the whole thing, the most time-consuming part of which was printing out the picture for the top on the photo-cake fondant.

Tomorrow he has to make a three-hour round trip to deliver the mini wedding cakes and the red velvet cakes he was doing near the end of the day. So he doesn't have to do all the driving and so he doesn't have to worry as much about falling asleep in the van, he's taking this guy with him, let's call him Larry. Larry used to come into the bakery once in awhile--I think he painted some signs for Bossman at some point. In any case, at this point Larry is apparently homeless, so, given the weather, has been staying in shelters. He also makes the occasional delivery for Bossman, and he fixes things sometimes, too.

However.

Larry creeps me out on some gut level (and may I say that I've worked with ex-convicts and such, so the facts about him wouldn't necessarily be a problem for me). He mentions a "caseworker" and Bossman says that Larry is trying to get some kind of disability because of a bad back and maybe some psychological something, too (no one really has details). Even that, not necessarily a problem. Except, Bossman apparently told Larry he could use the computers downstairs, which he did on an occasional basis. The past week or so, it's more than occasional--he's down there every morning when I come in, for example--and, apparently, Larry's trying to find a date on yahoo or wherever. First off, if you're unemployed and homeless and always have your hand out, then perhaps you have more pressing issues than finding a date, and your situation might improve more rapidly were you to focus on those more pressing issues. Second, today I ended up having to throw Larry off of two different computers, because I needed to use them (in succession, because of where the color printer is). When I sat down at the first one, right after Larry got up, on a whim I looked at the browser history, and it turns out that Larry had been visiting a site called [ethnic group][age group][sexual practice] dot com. After I went upstairs I asked Bossman how secure his computer is, with regard to viruses and the like, and, of course, he takes others' word for it. So I told him about this website in the history, noting that I did NOT click on it, but there it was.

Later this afternoon, Bossman's wife was downstairs, and when she comes up, she's telling Bossman to throw the guy off the computers, that it's "inappropriate." I have no idea whether she was objecting to him being there at all or objecting to something she saw him viewing, but it doesn't really matter. She also pointed out, correctly, that their whole lives are down there on the various computers, meaning he could steal their identities, say. (She's not technologically sophisticated enough to use that phrase, but she's correct that all of their personal and business stuff is around down there, and accessible to someone who wanted to go through it.) Bossman got rid of Larry without any explanation at the time, but then later asked me what he should tell Larry.

I said, well, you could just say that you thought it was an occasional thing, that you feel like he's taken advantage of you ("And I do feel that way," Bossman noted), and you don't want to have to monitor what he's doing, so he needs to just go to the library. Which is probably more or less what he'll say.

/rant zone

At one point yesterday, Andi is standing to my left at the work table and Bossman is to her left (I forget what we were all doing), and Andi asks if I've seen "An Inconvenient Truth," saying how much it disturbed her. I say no, but I know what it's about; I note that it was made about Al Gore, and she says, wasn't he, like, a politician? I say, "Yeah, he ran for President a few years ago . . . and won." Bossman kind of chuckled at that, but didn't comment; he's claimed to like Republican Faux News commentators and the like, so we studiously avoid talking about politics per se (though he has mentioned he thinks the war is a disaster), but I sometimes wonder if I don't have some subtle effects on him in that regard. I'm as lefty as they come--more than most, perhaps--but i doubt I fit the Faux News stereotype of bleeding-heart liberal (especially with my remarks yesterday about Larry). Plus, he'll ask me oddball questions (yesterday, "American Pie" was on the radio, so we chatted a bit about how old we were when it came out, then he turns around and says, "What's that song about?" And I say, "Buddy Holly; when he died.") and be entertained by the fact that I know something about whatever he asked. Earlier yesterday: he mentioned something about a man's reach should exceed his grasp, and noted that Bruce Willis said that in some movie he was in with Paul Newman. I said, that's from "Nobody's Fool," which is based on one of my favorite books of all time, and it's actually a quote from a poet (though i guessed wrong about the poet--I found the right cite for it and reported back later).

The point is, one of the things I love about working there, and working with him in particular, is that I have once again gotten lucky in terms of a boss: I work for someone who likes it that I'm smart, who uses it, and who isn't threatened by it or afraid of it. Which, really, rather rocks.

Today, however, I have already made my tea for the week, plus a mug of it to sip (actually I'm on my second mug), and taken a shower. I'm about to repair to the couch, where I'm going to work on needlepoint for a few hours and then get a massage. I figure, since I'm not spending the money on anything else, and there's room in the budget for it, I'm going to do it when I can.