I spent some time unemployed between my paper route and my next job, but that's okay since I was still in high school and living with my parents. My second job was at Weis Markets which is a grocery store chain here in Pennsylvania. I'm not sure if it has branched out into other states but I'm sure there are a few in the surrounding states. It was my job to clean the bakery after all the bakers had left. Sugar, flour, and hardened dough were everywhere by the time I arrived at work.
It was my job to scrape and clean off the tables. Wash all the trays, utensils, and huge 40lb. steel mixing bowls, and sweep and mop the floors. Once a month I had to clean the walk-in cooler, so I had to move everything out, hose the place down and then move everything back in. I liked it when the hot hose water hit the cool floor of the cooler and the place would become full of steam, it was like being in a sauna. So those were my job duties for the most part. Once in awhile a customer would ask me to write on a cake for them. These were people who weren't too picky since I wasn't very good a writing with a bag of icing. But at least it was readable, and Cake Wrecks wouldn't be around for another ten years or more, so I was safe. I also took cake orders as well.
One time I took a cake order for a deaf couple. I don't know sign language, but they were very patient and we were able to communicate pretty well since they were able to point at what they wanted and were able to know what I was saying since they could read lips. I have an uncle who is deaf, so that helped too since I was used to being around someone with a hearing disability.
In addition the the walk-in cooler, there was also a walk-in freezer, and on oven that was big enough to stand in. The oven would still be warm while I was working. So if I needed a break and I was too hot, I could stand in the cooler and cool off. If I was too cold, I could stand in the oven, which kind of freaked me out a little, but it was nice and toasty.
One day I bought a can of Coke and it was warm, so I stuck it in the walk-in freezer for a few moments to let it cool. I forgot about it though and it wasn't until the next day that I remembered I had put it in there. I thought I was going to be in trouble when I went into work, but nobody said anything. I looked in the freezer under the rack where I put the can of Coke. The bottom of the can had gone from concave to convex and the Coke had exploded out of the can all over the wall, but just underneath the rack so it wasn't a huge mess and no one must have noticed. So I cleaned it up and made sure never to do that again.
I called this post "Softball Doughnuts" because a friend of mine who also worked at Weis's used to come back to the bakery and we would make our own doughnut creations. The one we liked best was when we took a doughnut and filled it with cream until it was about the size of a softball, hence the name, softball donut. It probably had about four times the amount of cream as a regular filled donut. Yummy. Something like that would probably make me really sick now though, blah.
My favorite memory of working there was the time I played a prank on a friend who came to visit me at work. I gave her a tour of the bakery and then I showed her the walk-in cooler. When she wasn't looking I shut the door and acted like it shut on its own. Then with a panicked look on my face I told her that we couldn't get out from the inside once the door had shut and that we'll probably have to wait until morning to be let out. She bought it for a few minutes until she realized how dumb it would be do design a walk-in freezer that didn't have a way out, so she opened the door. I was such a dork back then. Sometimes I still am.
Come back next week when I'll talk about job #3. Tell me about things that happened at your jobs in the comments.
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