3,600 pounds of Cake

...with a quiz at the end, and then a bit of a break....

I’m about to take a big risk in stepping away until Thursday…time with friends up north. Septuagenariens on skis- every skier’s nightmare. Will I lose you as a reader? I’ll find out Friday moring, I guess. Hope not.

In the meantime, here’s a longish memoir I wrote for the archives for my granddaughters. It’s about getting into trouble.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with getting into trouble. We all do something wrong now and then, intentionally or otherwise, and sometimes our wrongdoing seems, to us, to be defensible, appropriate, or even necessary. Protests, demonstrations, and fighting against unjust norms or old protocols on behalf of others, or for beliefs that deserve expression or defense….

Well, kids, I’ll just say that if you ever get in trouble for defending a principle, call me. I’ll spring you.

But “getting in trouble at work” somehow feels different from other kinds of trouble. Buying a ticket or a permit and then getting into trouble for abusing the implied or stated contract is one thing. But getting into trouble while you’re doing a job that someone is paying you to do feels like quite a different kind of trouble.

When I was a kid, my buddies and I paid to get into Gaslight Village, an amusement park at Lake George. One night, at the top of the Ferris wheel, I lost my grip on an open pack of exploding cherry clusters. They cascaded down through the steel structure, popping and crackling harmlessly but scaring the daylights out of everyone below, including the lift attendant. Well, I got in trouble for that, but I understood why. We were kicked out, and it was right that we were.

That same summer, my brother and I and some friends went to The Painted Pony Dude Ranch and cheered lustily for the animals. We created a disturbance by doing that. They sold tickets with the understanding that the cowboys were the heroes, the stars. But our sympathies were with the cows- or we were just being wise guys. Either way, we violated the norms at the Painted Pony Rodeo when we cheered for the calves that slipped the rope. We were kicked out, and it was right that we were.

But “getting into trouble at work” is different. At work, someone is paying you to perform a task or to provide a service to an enterprise or for a constituency. Employment is a relationship that carries the three essentials of a contract: competency (you can do it, and they believe you can it), consent (everybody knows what they are getting into), and consideration (each side is getting something from the relationship). So when someting is out of kilter, it can feel a lot more onerous than getting kicked out of an amusement park for dropping your exploding cherry clusters

Peg suggests that my story of “The Wrong Chute” might be of interest. It was my first trouble at work. I’ve never written it down. Until now. Wanna’ hear?

When I was in school but still too young to drive a bakery truck, I spent a couple of summers and winter school breaks working at the Freihofer cake bakery in Albany. I was saving every penny I could earn to buy a car for college – still years away - but dad said that any car purchase would be on me, and I put in as many hours as I could to build my little account.

The Freihofer cake bakery took up most of a city block on Spruce Street in the gut of Albany. It was an ancient, cavernous, windowless five-story brick building which well concealed the wonders going on inside.

The then-famous Freihofer’s Chocolate Chip Cookies were born there each day, as were the legendary Louisiana Rings, Corn Toasties, Raspberry Squares, and Dixie Prides. The building looked decrepit but the neighborhood smelled heavenly, and the work going on inside was never boring. The individual tasks could be dull and repetitious, activities like gently fitting four sugar, four cinnamon, and then four plain donuts into flimsy “dozen boxes” while under the pressure of an unrelenting conveyor belt pushing empty boxes and loose donuts at you in an endless stream.

Individual tasks might have been tedious, but the flow of the work throughout the day was like competing in the decathlon. Pulling racks of pies out of the oven might take a few hours, then the donuts, then over to the racks to grease the Louisiana Ring pans with lard before filling them with batter, or off to the loading dock to wrestle 100 pound bags of mix out of a trailer, or de-panning the Corn Toasties with a practiced flick of the wrist for the crew waiting downstream at the wrapper.

Each station was driven by the clock, paced by the conveyors, and choreographed by the necessary synchronization of mixing, panning, baking, cooling, de-panning, and packaging. Long days went by quickly, and sleep came quickly, too.

One morning - the day I got into trouble - I was told to report to the fifth floor, the Mixing Room, a sanctuary I had never visited. Someone had called in sick and they were short-handed up there.

Allegra Cannon, the Plant Manager, a real fireball, had said to her right-hand guy, “Get the kid up there.” By this time in the summer, I had become “the kid.” My rep was as a pretty hard worker who needed to be watched like a hawk because he didn’t always know what he was doing, and as the more experienced hands well knew, hard work in the wrong direction in a bakery can lead to trouble, and fast.

Once upstairs, a voice barked from the corner. “Keeeed. Geeet ohhhver here!” Jock, or, to be accurate, Jacques, a French-Canadian for whom English was not a first language, was the Head Mixer. Jock was a legend to us denizens of the lower floors. Jock, the Master Mixer. All work downstairs started with and was sustained by him.

If Spruce Street had an Olympus, the Mixing Room was the summit, and Jock was Zeus.

“Follow me!” Jock barked. “Do jeees only whot I say!”

Thus began my first and final day as an Apprentice Mixer.

Other than Jock, the Mixing Room’s most important asset was gravity. All mixing took place on the fifth floor. Special batters for the cookies, cakes, and fillings were mixed there and dispensed from up high, poured out of enormous bowls straight down through any one of six stainless steel chutes to any one of six equally enormous stainless steel “depositors” located on the floors below. Stout railroad tracks affixed to the ceiling enabled us to maneuver these heavy concoctions to their proper chutes. Even a kid could push upwards of six hundred gallons (almost two tons) of mix suspended from the ceiling to where it needed to go.

This particular morning was a Sheet Cake shift. I could tell right away because the place smelled like bananas, and the only thing Freihofer’s made with banana was a Banana Sheet Cake. Jock had just finished mixing the ingredients and was coupling the massive bowl to the overhead chain hoist. He showed me how to maneuver the bowl across the room to one of the chutes, then how to attach another chain to second hoist that would tip the enormous bowl off of its beefy casters to allow the thick batter to pour out of the bowl and into the chute.

“Eeees eeesy, keeed.”

After the Banana Sheet Cake came the Spice Cake, then a Gold Cake, and Maple Walnut, and even though I don’t fully recall the sequence of these warm-up acts, I do remember that by the time we got to the German Chocolate, I was in a groove. On a roll.

Icarus was flapping closer to the sun.

Wordlessly - through body and sign language, mostly, because the place was a cacophony of whining mixers, shrieking pneumatic pumps, clanging chains, and pressure washers - Jock had me help him finish a batch of mixing and then I would take it from there, hauling the massive bowl to just above the designated chute, affixing the chains and the activating the electric hoist to drain the bowl- “the dump” - then a wash-down of the bowl and the chute into a drip-pan somewhere far below, out of sight on a lower floor. Then I’d trot back to Jock for the next round.

Flap, flap, flap.

What “trouble” could possibly ensue when an eager kid pours 3,600 pounds of German Chocolate Sheet Cake batter down a chute and into a receptacle of 3,600 pounds of capacity sixty or seventy fet below? Where’s the trouble in that?

Maybe Jock got a bit loose with his supervision. Maybe my boyish enthusiasm precluded asking a clarifying question that should have been asked. Maybe, in the dappled afternoon light streaming through the skylights above, two fingers might have been misconstrued as three, or three fingers misread as two, leading the eager kid to the wrong chute.

Maybe Daedalus had let out a little too much line for Icarus?

Someone told me later what it was like at the other end, on the second floor, as 3,600 pounds of German Chocolate Sheet Cake batter achieved something close to terminal velocity at the end of Chute #3….and quickly overfilled the 32 ounce drip pan sitting underneath.

Mary, I think her name was, told me that she’d been standing under Chute #2, about thirty feet away, looking up, patiently waiting for our batter to flow into the massive depositor (Capacity: 4,000 pounds) that would then fill individual German Chocolate Sheet Cake pans on the conveyor. Mary later said that when the batter hit the drip-pan under Chute #3 thirty feet away, she felt it as much as heard it. I’ve not done the math to determine the terminal velocity of 3,600 pounds of German Chocolate Sheet Cake slamming into a brick floor sixty feet below, and neither has Mary. It was like a “chocolate freight train coming through the ceiling,” Mary told me later. “I ain’t never heard no bomb go off and I haven’t been in no earthquake, but I think I did both today.”

Hers was a pair of double negatives, but mine was the bigger boo-boo.

So, anyway, I got in trouble. Nobody was going to pin this on Jock, and I was totally OK with that. He had skills, a resume, a winning record. He’d trusted me, and I’d taken that trust as an absolute, a signal that I was “a natural” instead of an apprentice.

Fortunately, no one was injured.

It was a family company and I was family, so I didn’t get fired. That’s called big-time unearned privilege. But I did pay a humiliating public penance over the next three days, all alone with a pressure washer, a squeegee, sponges, and big blue five-gallon buckets, cleaning up the spectacular mess that I’d made. It was like being in Detention, but all day, and in public. I deserved every minute of it.

After that summer, they moved me into Sales.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Reading Club Discussion Questions: Readers, what do you think?

If the republican senators were to make a mess like this, would they clean up afterwards?

If the republican senators were to make a mess like this, would it actually have happened?

If the republican senators were to make a mess like this, would they regret having closed the border to workers who would clean up after them?

If the republican senators were to make a mess like this, would Jock be fired for having placed the batter into their care?

Do fish get thirsty?