RE: Trailer Trash 62, 62 pt 1

    As invigorating as it had been to get Manager John in trouble for his scheduling shenanigans on Tuesday afternoon, and see both Tracy and Manager Bob practically lining up to kick the man when he was down—that incident wasn’t without its consequences. On Thursday morning after having enjoyed an entire Wednesday off, Mrs. Moore clocked into work at Food Lion to discover a stony-faced Manager John… who had decided not to put her on register today.

    “We don’t need you in Front End today,” Manager John had said in a flat tone devoid of all of his usual pretense of friendliness. “They need someone in Bakery, so head on over and ask for Claudia.”

    Having spent a few days already learning the ins and outs of being a checkout clerk and getting comfortable with that, Mrs. Moore helplessly complied, feeling the familiar creep of icewater in her veins at the prospect of having to restart training in a whole new area from scratch. Not only that, it was in Bakery, the department that both Cindy and Frank had warned her about the other day! There didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it right now if Manager John wanted to make her shifts difficult for getting him in trouble. Thus, Mrs. Moore had headed back across the aisles towards the corner of the store where she remembered the bakery was, and with hesitant, halting steps she finally went around the counters there and entered the tiled area for employees just behind, feeling as skittish and unsure of herself as a lost child.

    “Can I help you?” An irritated voice had demanded.

    “Um? Manager John sent me here,” Mrs. Moore had confessed. “For today. I’m Shannon.”

    The woman who’d been staring her down was short and heavyset to the point where she had a squat figure, and was wheeling a tall metal rack with sliding shelves, upon which clear-plastic bagged packs of buns and rolls and loaves were waiting to be distributed to the display shelf on the wall adjacent to the bakery counters. The woman’s nametag read Shirley, but from her dour expression there seemed to be no intention for her to introduce herself or welcome the newcomer.

    “Claudia isn’t in, yet,” Shirley stated. “I’m gonna need you to move. You’re in the way.”

    “Oh… sorry!” Mrs. Moore had flinched back to step to the side.

    As Shirley waddled on to push the cart past her, however, it was clear that there had already been plenty of room in the first place.

    Not knowing what else to do, Mrs. Moore held her hands in front of her and waited, taking nervous looks around the bakery. The department was cordoned off from the store proper by its customer counter, which also served as a glass display for cupcakes, cookies, donuts and other assorted pastries. The display compartment opened from both sides in some sections, allowing customers to self-serve, while other areas would require one of the clerks there to fetch whatever a customer wanted.

   Glancing around, there was no sales terminal here, which was a relief. There was however a large scale, a label machine that had its own computer interface for inputting information and putting store barcodes on stickers, the lower shelves of a big metal rack were stacked with different sizes of plastic bags waiting to be filled with baked goods, while every shelf higher up was filled with colorful bags of icing and a cluttered assortment of metal icing tips, rigid plastic containers in stacks shaped to hold muffins or cupcakes, order form booklets, and dozens upon dozens of little white boxes with different letter and number codes written on them with sharpie.

    “You just gonna stand there?” Shirley griped at her as the woman returned, no cart in sight. She had apparently left the rolling rack sitting out there by the display shelf wall. “Grab a broom, or something, Jesus Christ. Back corner. Find something to do!”

    Shannon had then scurried off into the back area to discover a work table, a small standing desk littered with papers just beneath a wall-mounted telephone, a set of heavy metal doors she recognized as either cooler rooms or freezer rooms from the times she had walked past the similar ones over back by Dairy, and a half dozen more tall rolling racks here and there filled with goods that made the back bakery area feel cramped and claustrophobic.

   The grocery store bread oven was a colossal stainless steel piece of industrial equipment with large, wide, lift-open doors for sliding in big trays, and an incomprehensible digital readout for each which showed times counting down and different indicator lights or modes of some kind selected. The long glass windows on each of the oven compartments were scoured with grime and crusted soot from the insides, and impossible to see through due to the accumulation from years upon years of constant use. Not daring to waste too much time getting her bearings, Mrs. Moore had searched out a worn old broom and then canvassed the area with it, sweeping crumbs and flour dust out from beneath everything.

    By the time Claudia arrived, Mrs. Moore had run out of things to pretend to tidy up and was relieved to have some apparent authority figure here to tell her what she should be doing. Claudia was a tall woman in her fifties with a dyed burgundy bob-cut—the same artificial shade Tracy from Front End sported, in fact—in a mesh hair net, and plastic-rimmed aviator style glasses, thick ones, that un-magnified her eyes and that entire swath of her face until they were tiny beady features.

    “You need a hair net if you’re gonna be in the back,” Claudia immediately gave Mrs. Moore a look of disapproval. “Up front, just beneath the bread slicer.”

    With an apologetic wince, Mrs. Moore hurried to comply, rushing back out to the front area. She had not been introduced to the protocols or different stations here, but after looking around in a mild panic she discovered a bizarre heavy contraption with a grill-like row of blades that could only be their supermarket bread slicer, and just beneath that a worn box where she could grab a little disposable hairnet. It took Mrs. Moore a few awkward moments to try to pull the folded netting out, and then once she slipped it on over her hair it felt absolutely ridiculous, with part of the mesh digging in across her forehead.

    She had no idea how to properly wear this thing and didn’t dare to try to adjust it until it was more comfortable without a mirror, for fear that it might not cover all of her hairline then.

    “Do you know how to answer a phone?” Claudia demanded in a tone just a hair short of mocking.

    “Um,” Mrs. Moore had frozen mid-fidget, wanting to immediately answer yes but not sure what all answering phones here might entail. “Not at a Food Lion?”

    And so it was that her first official training for the department was going over an order form template with Claudia, with Claudia impatiently explaining each of the already-labeled form areas she needed to get information from calling customers with.

    They needed a name and a phone number. Their cakes were yellow, chocolate, and marble. Their sheet sizes were round, half, full, and double, each with printed measurements by inches beside the column. Icing options were a checkbox for either whipped or buttercream. Colors and trim needed to be written in by hand, writing in icing needed to be marked within quotation marks. Customers would ask if they had this or that cake topper decorations for birthdays they had, and Shannon would have to ask them to wait, walk all the way around back to the front, and flip through the booklet they kept atop the customer counter to find what they were talking about, then check the listed letter and number code, and confirm that they still had that cake topper in stock by referencing the little white boxes on one of the rack’s upper shelves before returning to the phone.

    After walking her through all that, Claudia had slipped out a long sheet of parchment paper, ripped it off, and set it up at the back work table. Then Claudia brought over three bag pouches of icing with metal tips, and told Mrs. Moore to practice writing ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ with them onto the parchment paper as neatly as possible, until she was out of icing. For the first hour of the day, Mrs. Moore did that and nothing but that, writing cursive letters with as much care as she could into neat rows. It wasn’t difficult but it did still require practice learning to squeeze the icing pouch at just the right pressure to draw out words with icing.

    She would be terrified to write on someone’s actual cake, and she focused all of her attention on what she was doing because she felt sure that moment was coming dreadfully soon.

    When she’d emptied all the bags, Claudia shooed her out of the way, folded over the parchment paper to smear the icing into a big mess, and then the woman quickly squeezed and pressed the words into a blob… which she then wrung back out into the same icing pouches which Mrs. Moore had been working with all day. A fresh sheet of large parchment paper was pulled out and spread across the table, and then Mrs. Moore was to continue her practice.

    She got little accomplished in that regard over the next several hours, however, because it became apparent right away that the Springton area had a lot of people with birthdays in January. The telephone on the wall seemed to ring every five minutes or so, and although the first few were nerve-racking as she hurried to double-check the order template and ensure she hadn’t missed any important information, the rote process of taking so many calls made even that a familiar routine before too long. Only one time did someone request a cake topper toy, one from the cartoon Rugrats, and it was easy enough to find after flipping through the Decopac catalog book and then checking the boxes for the scribbled D 19.

    Although Shirley or Claudia bustled through with purpose moving around trays of dough from the racks or occasionally pulling something out of the oven to cool on the work table for a bit, for most of the day both of those women either stayed in the front area to gossip with one another and occasionally help customers, or they were off in another part of the store. For whatever reason they had to wheel racks back the whole way through Food Lion to the back of the store to something called a ‘proofer,’ which was some necessary part of the baking process but somehow they did not have room to install it here in the actual bakery.

    This… isn’t so bad, just yet? Mrs. Moore told herself as she picked up the icing bag and returned to scrawling out ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ in light blue icing across the parchment. I just do what I’m told, and that’s that. They’re certainly miserable people here, but I was already expecting that, and they haven’t been TOO mean, I guess. I’ve stayed out of their way, and they just leave me to do what they told me to do. There’s not nearly as many things to memorize as there is with working one of the front registers. It’s… it’s really not so bad, back here!

    Almost as if in mockery of her attempts to console herself, the topmost bread oven timer ticked down to all zeroes and immediately started a loud, incessant beeping that filled the entire bakery. Mrs. Moore flinched at the sudden sound and then looked around, but nobody else stepped into the back to check on it. She set aside her pouch and peeked around the corner to find Shirley or Claudia—and naturally, both of them were absent. The oven alarm was still beeping loudly, and Mrs. Moore had no idea what on God’s green earth to do about it. Hurrying back over to stand in front of the gigantic boxy device, it was clear that the top compartment was ready, but—what was she supposed to do with it?

    Do I, um, do I try hitting buttons?! Mrs. Moore flustered over the readout as anxiety flooded her body. Is it burning? I think I smell burning… a little bit? Or, is that just normal baking smell?! None of these buttons make sense! Why, WHY ON EARTH would they step away from this, as if I knew what the heck I was supposed to do when timers go off?!!

/// This one comes off a bit stilted because of the tenses and timing, I wanted to keep the 61 parent bit for Mr. Moore and and have the 62 parent bit be Mrs. Moore, but Tabitha is technically already halfway though day even though a lot of this takes place in the morning... I may rework it later so that it's not so awkward.

/// The bakery I worked at for two years was attached to a grocery store, and while it did have room for a proofer in the bakery department even throughout its remodel... we did not have room for a bigger cooler room to match. We had to wheel the dozen racks all the way through the sales floor back and forth to the dairy cooler and have our shit getting in their way all the time, so hopefully that kind of BS with these people not having their proofer where it should be doesn't break suspension of disbelief.

( 61, Singing to herself. | RE: Trailer Trash | Next, 62 pt 2 )