The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Baker

Hey, you got an extra donut in there for me? Oh, they're for later--yeah, whatever. Soooo..., you're gonna be a baker, huh? Here's what's in store, the way I figure:

You'll probably have no trouble getting an apprenticeship, judging from the number of bakeries you already frequent--no doubt you can talk some fifth generation baker who's heartbroken that his son Gianni refuses to take up the family business to take you on. After you listen to several hours of "You will make me proud and be my son now like he would if I had stayed in the old country" as your future employer grows drunker on the wine he keeps in the back, your apprenticeship is firmly in place.

You're ambitious, and you learn quickly, and one thing you soon realize is that if you're going to keep up the pace in his kitchen and handle the heat of the ovens, you're going to need to shed the extra 30 pounds you're carrying. Look kid, I can say that if anyone can--I'm not exactly svelte here myself. Your working hours take a little getting used to, but after a while it seems normal to set your alarm for 3 a.m., and when you finish work before noon, you can get into the gym to burn off calories before the crowds arrive.

You alternate your time between the bakery and the community college where you're getting your "formal" training. It's there that you adopt the ancient emnity between your kind--bakers--and your hated rivals, the pastry chefs. Your jealousy and hatred is something almost innate whenever you see their smirking, superior faces--not unlike the unbridled loathing the mere optician feels for his nemesis, the optometrist.

Your life isn't all breads and pies, however, and you pine for a normal social life when your evenings end around the same time most of your friends are just heading out for a night on the town. Your sleep patterns suffer for it, but you learn to compensate for a week's worth of early morning loneliness with increasingly wild and debauched weekend adventures.

Eventually, though, you tire of mindless hedonism, and when you ask out the cute college girl who mans the bakery's counter one summer, you're happy that she accepts, and soon you're in your first serious relationship. The problem is, unlike you, she keeps normal hours, and you can't rightly expect her to stay home nights because you have to get up early. Instead, you wallow in jealously imagining her out with other guys as you knead dough alone at 4 a.m.--after all, her inhibitions only vanish late in the evening, when you're hardly ever around.

Despite your jealousy and paranoid delusions, you make it through your apprenticeship successfully, with a tentative hold on both your sanity and your romance. Your boss looks worried each morning at six a.m. as you call your girlfriend's house and hang up when she answers, but he has seen that look in your eyes, and knows better than to ask questions. He seems almost relieved when you tell him you've bought a small bakery across town and he wishes you success.

You now work alone most of the time, and you feel that as a young, enterprising businessman, you are ready to take the next step. You propose to your girlfriend, and struggle to maintain composure when she hesitates and asks for time. For the next few weeks, you're on your best behavior, and work to overcome one of the main stumbling blocks to your relationship--the low opinion her parents have of you. Their hopes for their daughter involved her marrying a doctor or a lawyer, someone able to maintain the silver spoon lifestye to which she'd become accustomed. She'd only worked in the bakery originally to buy a better stereo for the BMW her parents gave her on her 18th birthday.

Disaster strikes one evening when her parents invite you to dinner. On the way there she warns you that she may have given them the mistaken idea that you are a pastry chef, and that they have invited her cousin Robert, which she pronounces the french way, to meet you that evening. Robert is, in fact, a real pastry chef.

You maintain a sullen silence through most of dinner. Robert more than makes up for your aloofness with his witty stories of Paris, where he is studying at a world-renowned pastry institute. His faux french accent makes your blood boil, and it's worse when he insists on referring to himself as a "patissier". Eventually you jump to your feet and hurl the invective that's built up for four years inside you, ever since the community college pastry chefs so soundly defeated the much inferior bakers' softball team, and mocked you for months about it.

Your girlfriend is weeping as she leads you outside; you almost fight past her to attack her cousin once more when you hear his parting shot about "pop tarts". She tearfully gives you back her ring, and you close the bakery and get drunk for three days.

After the hangover wears off, you throw yourself into your work with renenewed passion, and manage to keep busy enough to numb the pain of your broken heart. You struggle to stay away from her, and resist the urge to start making your early morning phone calls again.

Just when you debate terminating your pathetic life, she walks in the front door of the bakery and confesses her misery since your breakup. The two of you hop on a plane to Vegas and a quickie wedding. When you get back, she replaces the counter girl and the two of you work to make the business a success together--you don't have any choice; her parents will cut her off completely when they learn of the marriage.

It's a few months before your paranoid jealousy begins again. You shift her hours to more closely match your own--who cares that no customers want to shop at 6:00 a.m.--and you hire a part time staffer to serve the late afternoon crowd. Still, you barely avoid criminal charges when you mistakenly take a customer's offhand remark "nice buns" for a pass at your wife.

After six months the love of your life realizes her mistake, and runs off in the middle of the night--it isn't tough, after all, since you're already at work. You try desperately to find her, but all her parents will tell you is that she's gone to Europe. You hire a detective, who discovers that she went to stay with Robert, and she's taken up with one of his pastry chef friends.

It's only the conscientious work of Air France security personnel that save her life and put you behind bars until your transfer to the criminal psych ward finishes your career as a baker--at least on the outside. You do become very skilled at producing some of the finest waffles the other prisoners have ever seen; unfortunately their comments about buns do have a second meaning.

What? No, I'm not upset about the donut thing--some people are a little more possessive than others, that's all.


The 40 other career counsellor posts are here.