Getting Out

Jesus Old Man Chrysler did my feet hurt Friday night. Perhaps it's the 13 hours I spent standing on them at work? A day made more hellish than most farmers' market Fridays because Lole called in sick, and a day made even more full of resentment because the store manager who already makes $12/hour apparently said she was going to quit but then was provided with an "incentive" to stay. Monetary, one might guess. It's not that the store managers aren't working hard or are incompetent, mind you; that's not true at all, and that's not what I resent. (In my last job, several highly compensated people were complete fucking idiots who actually cost the company money and/or did damage; other highly compensated people worked their butts off and did a great job. The former annoyed the shit out of me, the latter not at all.)

I've reached the point where I don't even want to ask for more money, I just want to get the fuck out of there. Bossman knows what I'm worth, and he knows the products I put in the store and the backup I provide to him and to the business, and I shouldn't have to fucking ask. This isn't some big corporation where there are levels and managers and whatever--it's him, and he sees me there, five days a week, managing the production of 3500 croissants and making a fair number of them, checking in every fucking delivery from a supplier, getting new shit in the store cases, doing whatever needs doing.

I do not like feeling this angry and resentful, I might add. All of us think we're Special (and not just in that short bus way), all of us have moments when we feel underappreciated and underpaid, especially in comparison to That Person, all of us think something like, "They'll really miss me when I'm gone!!!!" And, probably, a lot of us are right; it's the rare business and the rare boss who really tries to compensate people fairly. I've been quite lucky in that regard--I think I've noted that my last two bosses tried very hard to get me compensated properly, and succeeded to some extent; certainly they regarded my contributions highly, and I knew that. That, I think, is what's bugging me here/now. Bossman sees what I'm doing, he can do math just like I can, he knows that croissants are 25% of the wholesale business--he himself noted in a recent newspaper article that our croissants are our best product--he knows how many of those tarts we've been selling at $4 a pop (I've been making somewhere around 60 to 80 a week, and there are never any left), he knows that I have to work another 10 to 20 hours a week on the editing to make ends meet, and so on.

Ah, well. He's going out of town in a couple of weeks--a 30th anniversary cruise, I think--but I don't know the exact dates. (Why would he bother to let me know ahead of time?) I've already decided that I'm not going in on Sunday or Monday to do the orders; normally I would, but I didn't get paid for Labor Day--I'm not scheduled to work on Mondays, don't you know, so I didn't get paid for that holiday. Ergo, I'm unavailable on any Sunday or Monday. The sad/annoying part is, it wouldn't take much to keep me around a little longer, but he's basically provided me with no incentive to stay, and my anger and resentment are such that it would take quite a bit of money at this point, for which I'm sure he (and his wife) would expect even more work. Better I should get out.

This week's new product--all my own idea, mind you--is using the hazelnut sablee crust, with the hazelnut frangipane, but putting a layer of chocolate inside; Nutella-esque, anyone? Thursday I did three test tarts, with three different types of chocolate, to figure out which one would work best--milk chocolate, to everyone's surprise. I drizzled chocolate on top (though it bloomed within a day, which I won't mention in front of Woody, because then we're in for a lecture on blooming chocolate), then yesterday caramelized some hazelnuts and glued them on with a dot of melted chocolate, and then put a little sharp edge of powdered sugar on it. Despite the fact that, according to Bossman, hazelnut is a hard sell, we sold 12 of them yesterday.

I also got to give two of them to the chef who got me the job at the bakery. He and his 3-year-old son and another chef--one who started after I'd graduated, but who is also French and who apparently thinks highly of me and my croissants--stopped by, so we chatted for awhile, and I made friends with the son (showing kids how machines work and taking them to places like the freezer downstairs for a special muffin go a long way to overcoming shyness). I loaded up the chef with two of the tarts, and some croissants, and a cookie and a mini muffin for his son; I gave the other chef a couple of croissants, too. It was good to see him, and fun to deal with his son, and nice of the other chef to be so nice to me.

And--hold on to your hats--I actually went out last night, by myself, and not just to dinner. A bar in the city is a gathering place for graduates of a nearby university whose football team was on television last night, plus there was a Musky Fest and a crowning of a Musky Queen, MCed by a local DJ to whom I listen in the morning and whom I happen to know a little. So I put aside my editing work, washed the flour out of my hair, and wandered down there last night. It was something of an anthropological expedition--I went to a Division III school, with a total of fewer than 3000 students in the college plus conservatory, so the huge state school experience is pretty foreign to me. I had a couple of beers, a couple of brats, watched the people and the game, talked to the DJ for a few minutes. Upon seeing me, he gave me his usual big hug, even though the last time I saw him was maybe four years ago and said, "Narya! How the hell have you been?" I gave him the very abbreviated (15-second) version of the past two years, which of course caused his mouth to gape a little. After the game, I made my way home and went to bed. The end.

This morning I got up and made tea and talked to mom and started editing. Yes, I also obsessed about what the fuck I'm going to do--and whined about it incessantly to J--but you all know that song. The basic thing I need to do is find more editing clients (or an office job, or both) and just get out of the bakery. Much as I like it, good as I am at it, it's not what I meant to do when I decided on pastry school nearly three years ago. If I get the clients and can work out something with the crunchy granola restaurant, fine, that would be nice; I'd like the chance to be the pastry chef, basically, at a place that embodies more of my own sensibility, and I'd like the chance to do it in circumstances where I don't have to be there to plate things and where I don't need to work full-time to make ends meet. I'd like the chance to figure out how to create desserts and breakfast pastries that people will buy; I'd like to create desserts that don't need plating and elaborate construction. And not just because I sucked at plating while in school. I've gotten better at the garnish thing, even. Rather, this restaurant is not one that can afford to have a pastry chef working a pastry line for dinner, which means desserts have to be self-contained in a particular way, which poses challenges of a different kind, and I'd like to take on the challenge.

So, instead of continuing to whine, tomorrow I'll edit the next bit, and force myself to make some queries to publishing companies. I suppose I could sit here and wait for them to magically find me, but I suspect that approach has limitations.