Five AM, and too damned dark even on daylight savings time. A bad breakfast in the stomach and a worse coffee in your hand. Red eyes and a brain that’s happy to be here because it means you didn’t have time left to think about life at home or life at all. Ears full of roaring, wheezing, groaning machines and in the distance that one long whining call of Jerry getting his arm extracted from an industrial icing extruder again. There’s ten thousand dollars’-worth of Granny-Style #14 (choc. ic.) in the back of your truck and an emptiness inside your stomach.
Another shift at the local cake depot.
***
The foundational deliveries are what start the day, of course. The places that can’t go without cake – your hospitals, city halls, megastores, and port authorities, all of whom take a lot of the fast-spoiling stuff like parfaits in addition to their monthly emergency stock lay-in of things like Pound (0-ic.). Later in the day you’ll hit up secondary high-flow areas like nursing homes, malls, and apartment complexes with more traditional mainstays like Baker’s Choc (choc. ic). In the evening you’ll go by the schools and offload some of the extra byproduct from the day’s travels; the stuff that got crimped by a forklift or smeared against the walls or smushed in a corner.
There are bills being considered to prohibit schools getting discounted cake. That’s cake that could go to retirees.
So your morning’s a lot of driving and a lot of signing delivery forms and a bit of sitting there and nodding and listening to someone telling you a long list of problems that you can’t help them with and aren’t interested in until they let you get a word in edgewise and that word is ‘talk to your boss’ and they won’t do that.
Makes you want to smash a pie into their faces. Can’t do that. Pies were trimmed out in the cutback frenzies of the ‘80s. If you want pie you’ll have to provide your own materials and labour, and you don’t have any time for that. You’re working on depot time, doing the depot tour, keeping the cake coming and breaking yourself down one vertebrae, one neuron, one nodding-along at a time.
You don’t deserve a medal for your service but you probably deserve one for not punching anyone while executing it.
***
Lunch is consumed in a greasy little box you set up yesterday if you had the energy; in a roadside box with a big bright logo on it if you didn’t. You didn’t, and you usually don’t. It’s thirty minutes long and you make sure to make those minutes last without running into that terrible, terrible moment where you have nothing to do but sit and watch the clock move and feel that aching hollow inside you get bigger and bigger, a void that no cake will fill.
When that happens you usually go to the truck and take a slice of Pineapple Upside-Down (Glz) and mark it down as spillage incurred at your least-favourite dropoff site (it’s a Walmart, it’s always a Walmart). It still doesn’t fill the void but it DOES quiet it down a bit.
***
When the deliveries are all done and the forms are all filled and that little ache in your spine is getting worse and worse and the sunlight is fading and the dark is getting too much to bear you return to your depot and hand over all your papers and you start the hardest part of the day, which is the small talk.
You are working hard, unless you’re hardly working. The coffee is bad, but at least it’s free. Hey, did you hear that Jerry got his arm stuck in a cake extruder and spoiled an entire batch of Boxed Vanilla (van. ic.)? Only the sixteenth time this month. How’s your day going? How ya been? How ya doin’?
The trick is to grunt a lot and say ‘can’t complain, nobody’ll listen’ and then grunt a lot more. And then the hard part’s over, and it’s almost time for you to be almost ready to get almost ready to go home.
***
Got to do the materials checklist before the night shift starts up, to make sure everything’s set for the midnight runs – the cake that moves out under cover of darkness, to go to places where cakes shouldn’t be noticed. Devil’s Food (ex. choc. ic.) and other even deadlier secrets. And of course beyond those there’s the emergency standby crews, forever ready to pounce the moment a fire breaks out or a kid falls through the ice or a shooting happens and there’s an urgent need for a rapid-response truck with one ton of pre-sliced Sturdy Pound (van. ic.) ten minutes ago. You’ve never driven one and you’ve never wanted to because frankly you already spend too much of your life drinking coffee and talking about coffee and wanting coffee and one more hour of that injected into your daily cycle might make you die from abstract causes. And you don’t like Sturdy Pound with icing; you’ll only eat it plain.
Once the materials checklist is done, there’s just the safety checklist (with its persistent entry on Jerry), and the cleaning checklist, and the sign-out sheet, and the office secret santa signup sheet, and that one form you forgot to sign this morning that you’re technically violating the law by signing in the evening but that’s the easiest way to deal with the whole thing as long as you never ever tell anyone that you did it, since then they’d have to either admit they do it too or get you arrested and fired in that order.
***
After that you leave, realize you forgot your wallet, go back, and leave again.
Then you can go home.
Just another day at the local cake depot. A hard day, a long day, a grinding day, an essential day.
Nobody ever said it’d be a piece of cake.