It's Only Dough
It was 15 minutes before the end of my shift and I was hoping to leave because I had my second Covid vaccine appointment in 45 minutes in the Bronx.
“Kate, we want you to see something.” The chef and the sous I don't know as well were standing in the lamination room. They had an uncooked tray of doughnuts that apparently I had missed. “Get a pot, you’re going to have to stay late and fry these.”
I was bewildered. They must know that the setup process alone — assembling the filling machine, whipping the ganache, heating the fondant — would take an hour. That night we’d discarded over 10 times as many doughnuts for being poorly laminated, and at a glance I could tell that half of these would go the same way. Finally, it dawned on me that the task made more punitive than economic sense. I was being told to stay after class to write lines on the chalkboard.
Any other day I would have stayed as long as it took, I explained, but today I had my vaccination appointment and I could not stay.
They stared at me. “Well then Dave and Jason will be doing it.”
I worked furiously for 15 minutes, whipping the ganache and heating the oil which hadn’t come to temperature by the time I left. I apologized over and over to my coworkers, who said it was okay with tired eyes.
“I’m so sorry, it won’t happen again,” I said on my way out, and they replied they’d be going over it with my manager.
I left with my stomach in a tight knot, full of guilt and regret for not checking the proofer carefully enough. Every night I’d been trying so hard not to fuck up, but evidently I hadn’t been trying hard enough. I wanted to cry. And then I had another thought.
I’m in my 30s, bitches. I have a little bit of perspective. Forgetting that tray was not evidence of laziness or lack of care. Forgetting is human, especially when a human is overworked and exhausted. I know exactly how hard I work and the depth of my perfectionism and I’m not going to tear myself to pieces over something like this on my time off.
There’s a fine line between caring about the quality of your work and being controlled by that care. I’ve seen employees across different industries get crushed by the latter. Eventually, many of them learn that not caring about product quality is the only way to get by. But that turns out to be crushing in its own way.
Workplaces use the rhetoric of care to make exploitation appear presentable. Long hours are justified by passion for the product or an inappropriate promise of “family.” I remember holding a crying office manager at one startup because she bore the brunt of the company’s poor messaging. The executives withheld information from us, she didn’t have it for our customers, and she was young and cared enough for it to wound her deeply when they were upset. Employees aren’t set up to possibly achieve success in the work they’re meant to be motivated by, and then are made to feel that they’re not working hard enough. When they still inevitably fail, punitive tactics are used. The worst part about punishment is the embedded insult: You don’t care enough about your work, so we’re going to make you care about avoiding punishment.
I want to care. Much of my satisfaction in life comes from pride in my work, and when I left my last job it was because I was being paid well but constantly having to put out things that I wasn’t proud of. I got tired and then apathetic and started to wonder if I did in fact care about my work or anything else. Since leaving, I’ve been gratified to rediscover how it feels to make things of quality. But as I explore my options in the food industry, I suspect that the only way to hold onto this state of grace will be to work for myself.
Does it have to be like this? Would socialism, universal basic income, co-ops, a gift economy, make the experience of working better? It feels like something must. We’re such a long way off from the dream of people being able to find satisfaction in their work and live one cohesive life, in which they can uphold their values and still get by. Obviously, I do not have any kind of solution. For now I’m going to work every night reminding myself it’s just a job and it’s only dough, though I know it could be more than that.