Times I Got Fired #1

The Bakery

“I…” began my new boss, pausing for utmost effect “...am the manager of the second. Biggest. Sainsbury’s bakery - in the county.” Thankfully, he granted me another few seconds for the significance of all that to settle. “Let me tell you, the only way I got where I am today - is through my tenacity.”

If I worked my arse off, I could be just like him: exhausted and arseless. A decade of 4am starts had accumulated underneath his eyes. Every part of him was ficelle thin, after developing a deep disgust for all the goods he baked, along with all the people who ate them. 

My bun-ravaged boss had high hopes for me. Hopes, in fairness, I had elevated in the job interview. That first impression, a great impression of a good employee, was never a lasting one. My hopes were all being high.

The benefit of the doubt is a precious and finite resource. One, as a committed stoner, I exploited and treasured. Nothing like those first few weeks of a soul-scouring job, where everyone assumes “aw, he’s just getting the hang of things” - before, one day, the penny drops “ah - he’s wilfully incompetent.”

After failing to prove myself, and another batch of tiger loaves, the realisation briefly filled the hollows of my boss’ face. I grinned back at him.

Cue: my demotion to the lowest, greasiest and most delicious rung of the bakery ladder: donut boy.

At the risk of revealing trade secrets, and incurring the sticky, slaughterous wrath of the Baker’s guild, I can tell you how they get the jam in donuts.

With one of these beauties: the old Edhard F-5001*.

6 quart, hopper pump, double spout, they sure don’t make ‘em like that any more.

For my own entertainment, an undervalued motive, I would pump up the jam from the instructed 4 to 10. Each box contained one sugar-kissed sticky grenade. Every fourth donut primed to detonate down the front of an unsuspecting picknicker. 

The toughest part of the job was waking at 3am every morning, after baking until 2am every evening. While late-night ganj wasn’t listed as a core responsibility of the role, I took it far more seriously than any other vocation. I’ve never worked day and night for half a decade straight.   

At the age of just twenty-one, I was already Oxfordshire’s preeminent expert in the disciplinary processes of The Big Four supermarkets.

Strike I

Still flush with the doubt, and its many benefits, that first strike was always a free play. I cashed mine with the only trip my crew of unherdable loungers could ever be rounded up for: Amsterdam.

My mum, a woman so kind she is morally incapable of telling white lies, called in sick on my behalf for four consecutive donut shifts.

No, as I said yesterday, he can’t come to the phone. He’s really not feeling himself, at the moment

She wasn’t lying - as it turned out. In some pongy coffee house, a photo was taken of me conducting a brooding symphony of my own imagining. 

The idea of this photo ending up on Facebook forced me deeper into a psychological trench. On the insides of my eyelids, I murder-mapped the degrees of separation all the way back to my boss. After an 8-hour shift, as spiritless as any at the rollface, I had a breakthrough. Oh - I don’t care. Not even in the slightest.

Strike II

There are few feelings better than leaving a job you hate to get fucked up with your buddies. If you’ve only ever achieved, you’ll never know.

In a young hurry, I bought a 20-pack of beers from the same establishment I was working at the very next morning. Freeze-frame heel-clicking out the door, the supermarket manager acknowledged my haul with some tame banter - “ooh steady on with those,” he dadded. 

My logic was: making my intentions so unmistakably clear to the most senior member of staff would surely motivate me out of bed in the morning. The one flaw in that logic was not accounting for the kind of flawed logician who would come up with it. The two skengheads charged with stirring me were invited to go fuck themselves, which, given the climate, they might well have. 

Strike III

Sensing my baking days were numbered -  at 1 or less - I gave in to the playful misguidance of my stoning buddies. We stayed up all night ripping hits from our beloved bong, the late Stinky Pete. R.I.P. Like all paraphernalia in our den of lengy klutzes, Stinky Pete was taken from us far too soon.

For those of you with a memory, the difference between a joint and a bong is kind of like the difference between a beer and a shot.  

My usual 40-minute bike ride took north of two hours. There was some sort of metaphysical interference with the gears of the bicycle and those of time itself.

Late for work is one thing. Late and high for work is another. 2-hours-late and too-high-to-breathe is another thing entirely.

Under the bright bakery lights, I claimed a rare and mysterious sickness, which exactly mimicked the effects of marijuana.

“What’s wrong with you today?”

“I really don’t feel myself. I just feel tired, groggy, confused,” silly, fretful, peckish. I moaned, rubbing off jammy hands on the back of my trousers.

At the doughnut fryer, I was asleep on my feet. Eyes hardly open anyway, closing out that last slit of bubbling oil seemed the most natural thing in the world. High enough to defy the scientific literature and add human beings to the select list of mammals who can sleep standing up. I dreamed the dreams of a man sleeping above a tank of sizzling grease. 

“Are you fucking asleep!?” 

Those words startled me from my upright slumber with the bolting panic of a cow-tipped Heffer.

I gave the frying baskets a performative rattle, just to show I was still about it. Only shaking that vat of scalding hot oil was not strictly a stage of the production process.

“Get him off donuts. Now.”

My farewell disciplinary was a needlessly stuffy affair. The HR-appointed executioner was taking their job of terminating mine very seriously. I took the dismissal better than few others in the multi-millennial history of employment, a dopey grin on my fat face throughout.

As I walked out through the staff room, none of my now-former colleagues would look me in the eye. Openly high, I laughed my way out the door, with an in-date children’s birthday cake in my knapsack. 

To this day, wafts of warm bread still make me shudder. 

*This post was brought to you by Edhard. Please use my code JAMTERRORIST at checkout for a 10% discount on the most complete jelly filler on the market today - here.

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