IPPT Failure.

Went for my first IPPT as an NSMen yesterday at Maju Camp, and needless to say from the lack of training, I did not mange to get a pass.




It was something I had foreseen before I went, really the only reason why I went in the first place was because I had already made a promise with my friend to take the IPPT with him, otherwise I would have just procrastinated, stayed at home and have a much needed sleep.


Because of this IPPT session , I had to give up the only day in my week I could sleep in, and having to wake up to go take a fitness test I know I am going to fail sucked. It was a good way to gauge my current fitness level but it still sucked nonetheless to have to wake up so early.





During the IPPT session, I was most excited to take the standing broad jump, that was the only station I could attain a gold without even trying, and I managed to get a gold so that felt good, the stations that I weren't looking forward to were the shuttle run and the 2.4km run. The former I grazed my hands and the latter was just pure torture.




I actually was able to take the shuttle run 4 times, because I had faulted twice and really after failing the first try, you are pretty much screwed. There's no way your second try right after would be better than the first, and the reason why I screwed up my first try was because I did not tap the sensor strips at the end of the shuttle run, I underestimated the distance and ended up just slapping the floor with my hands and in the process, tore the skin on my palm, so I went for a second try right after and obviously failed that one.



So my friend and I decided to just try the other stations and go back to the shuttle run right after. Did the standing broad jump, got a gold for that one because of my amazing technique which I used to credit my continuous usage of the squat toilet to do a No.2 in Tekong every morning after breakfast,but after that, I found out it wasn't really the reason because right after Tekong, I stopped using squat toilets and was still able to get a gold for SBJ every time.



Did sit ups right after and when it came to my friends turn to use the machine, after almost 15 minutes of queuing up, the machine decides to malfunction, so he ended up doing probably 20 sets for naught and we had to join another queue and waited another 15 minutes for our turn.




After passing those stations, and the pull ups which we did first, I decided to go back to re-run the shuttle run again. So I was really pumped up and excited to give it another try after having given my legs sufficient rest, ran the first stretch, touched the sensor strips successfully, and as I was running, I could hear the Fitness Instructor saying something to me, which up to now, I still have no idea what he said, but I just ignored them and assumed they were words of encouragement, ran the second round, touched the strip, and as I was sprinting back in full force, I hear my friend going..

"STOP! STOP! STOP!"

So naturally, I slowed down and stopped, thinking the machine had malfunctioned and he's probably asking me to stop so I could conserve my energy for the next attempt, and for that split second as I was slowing down, both my friend and the fitness instructor just looked at me, confused... and that was when I knew I had fucked up, and my friend says to me...

"Why you stop? I am asking you to chiong! (speed up)"

My heart sank when he told me that, that pass that I could have gotten just slipped away from me because I heard "chiong" as "stop".



The fitness instructor was nice enough to reset my attempts and allowed me to try again, of course I failed the attempt the FOURTH time, was even worse than my very first attempt. I did not feel good after that and my friend felt apologetic for confusing me. Right after that, we headed to the 2.4km run, so when we got into the 2.4km run area, we went to join the very next batch that was about to run.




I thought this was going to be fine, I will just pace with my friend and then sprint during the last stretch. It was when the whistle was blown and I saw my friend dashing forward and leaving a huge distance between us did I realize how fucked I was.



It was only the first round and I already felt the shortness of breath and the strain in my legs, the fact that I had to run around the track another 5 rounds after that made it even worst, and I knew something was wrong because that level of exhaustion and strain doesn't happen that early on, I will only feel like death was the better option after covering slightly over half that distance.




So I just tried to knock that mentality out of my head and tried to just zone out and  pace with this middle aged Indian guy who looked like he could pass the test, halfway through the run, I ended up running almost  20 meters behind him and at this point, all I wanted to do was stop and walk the entire journey, but when I realized no one was actually stopping, I just continued running the entire way, it was hell the entire way and also I failed by 40 seconds, my final timing was 13 minutes on the dot, which was a big improvement on my record in the past year.





Failed 2 stations, passed 1 station, got silver for 1 station and gold for 1 station. Add that all up and I got a total of "FAIL".




I was aware I was going to fail when I went into the camp, but what I wasn't expecting was being so close to passing had I actually given myself sufficient time to actually sit down and rest before the 2.4km run, or just ran straight through the shuttle run without stopping because I misheard my friends encouragement for something else.




Gawd it sucks.

Long Rant

So I've spoken to my co-bakers and gotten to know them a bit over the past 3 months of working together in a bakery, listening to the radio as we went about our daily baking activities.



One thing I have found out from the 2 bakers that I speak to normally was that they both at one point had nightmares about working in the bakery.



One had nightmares about fondant cakes because that is all he does in the bakery, making fondant models or covering cakes in fondant, and I don't really like fondant, when I see a cake covered in fondant, it doesn't scream "Eat Me", plus it's really a waste of money because it's not cheap, I mean what the hell are you gonna do with the huge ass fondant model of Princess Elsa once you are done eating the cake, leave her in the freezer? Pluck her eyes out and eat them and leave her limbs and hair for other days when you are having a sweet tooth? Fondant is also not the best tasting frosting to have on a cake, so it does nothing in terms of flavor, they do have different flavorings but ultimately, all it taste like is sugar.






Another had nightmares of cake-pops because she makes cake-pops almost every other day, and seeing her having to hand roll hundreds of cake pops every other day, I can somehow feel her pain and also her displeasure in that horrible repetition. Her cake pop is like my rainbow cake, I don't really know if she hates making cake pops the way I hate making rainbow cakes, but she definitely hate it enough to start getting nightmares about it.


The cake pops in our bakery aren't really cake pops as well because instead of using butter cream, we use melted chocolate, which is by no means a good substitution as it just makes the whole thing really sweet and not as soft and yummy as it was originally intended to be because chocolate sets hard at room temperature.







I always thought when I first started working in that bakery, my nightmare would be of making multiple rainbow cakes, that isn't true though because if that was the case, than I am already living that nightmare because the boss actually asked the kitchen team to deliver at least 15 sets per delivery from the original 6 sets, and when I say kitchen team, I mean me, myself and I because I am the only one who's making the fucking rainbow cake for sales at the bakery. I will get to that problem later on.




As it turns out though, my real fear now is  of receiving new orders at the end of every week by the manager of the bakery, her job is essentially to collate all the orders she receive for the entire week, snap a photo of all the forms and just "Sent Image" the entire chunk of orders through our whats-app chat group, she doesn't tell us how many orders there are in that week before she starts flooding the chat group with the images, so my phone will just keep buzzing for probably 3 minutes straight as she looks through the order form on her side, snaps a picture of it and sends it over while, it's a constant barrage of orders that never seem to end and I will always be on my phone waiting for it to end before tapping all the images to download them, and just as I am about to download the last order form, , I will be greeted with another 10 pictures of new order forms.




It's extremely stressful because being the only one who handles all the baking of the cakes, I have to deal with every single order, and I always bake them as soon I possible so I could free the rest of the week for doing other things like topping up the different flavors of cupcakes, the buttercream, rainbow cakes and whatever else that needs to be topped up everyday, and it really grates on my nerves when a customer decides to change their order and the people who are working in the front of house who are dealing with these orders just accepts the changes and expects the kitchen team to do it.



And sadly, because my sous chef isn't a very firm person, instead of reprimanding the people at the front of house for accepting such last minute changes and screwing the kitchen team over, he just accepts it, discards the cake he has already crumb coated and covered with a layer of fondant and ask me to bake a new cake, I feel kinda bad for him sometimes when that happens but I also can't help but feel a bit angry when he doesn't try to protect the kitchen team.







So regarding my boss as well, the one issue I have with her is her lack of understanding about how the kitchen works. She's someone who doesn't bake so she doesn't know exactly how long it takes or how hard it would be to bake so many cakes in one sitting and she's a very ambitious person, so she will always want the team to come up with new ideas almost every week, new flavors to sell, new items to create, new designs for the cakes. It's fucking nuts because at this point, the bakery is selling so many different items there's no longer any focal point, I don't even know what the bakery specializes in now.




So recently, the boss decided it would be a good idea to promote a particular cake that has been selling exceptionally well, her idea was to have a 3 months long promotion with that cake, and the end goal was to have more people buy that particular cake. We have many other cakes as well that aren't selling as well but for some reason, she decides to push the one that's the supposed best seller.... it's none other than the fucking rainbow cake.



When the boss first told the kitchen team about this promotion, I got a bit taken aback because at that point, I was already having trouble making enough rainbow cakes to send over every week, she's also very well aware of how time consuming it was to make the rainbow cakes.



One day I decided to know what my sous chef thought about the promotion when we were out for lunch and he also found her promotion tactic to be a bit odd because why are you trying to promote a cake that's already selling so well when you can promote the other items that aren't selling as well, and also wasn't so time consuming to make.




When I say time consuming to make, I don't mean just to bake them but also to decorate because the poor decorate has to pipe it like this...

I'm not the one who's decorating the cake but one can only imagine how time consuming it is to not just decorate one cake but 15 of them at one go. When the decorator told me I had to bake more rainbow cakes to sell because it was already sold out at the store, I send her an emoticon of a gun shooting a crying emoji and then she replied saying that she also wanted to die, at that time I didn't know why but now I know why. That is a very time consuming method of cake decorating.

Another issue with the boss that comes about because of her lack of understanding how our kitchen works is that she doesn't regulate the orders that comes in. It doesn't matter if there are only less than 5 people in the bakery working, no amount of order was considered too much, she just ask the front of house to accept them whether the kitchen can handle it or not, I was told that at one point during the festive season, the bakers had to work till 12 midnight, they came in to work at 9 am that morning, worked till 12 midnight, probably got home at 1 am in the morning and had to report back to work again at 10 am only to repeat again probably the entire month.... that was when the previous baker decided to quit and I fully understand his reasons now that I am partly in his shoes, I didn't experience that crazy working hours so I can't say I can put myself in his shoes, but with the amount of orders we are getting now, I can see why he decided to quit after the festive seasons.

The other baker that I am working with has also told me of her desire to quit soon, after I told her that I will be leaving the bakery by the end of August kinda to let her know beforehand so she could mentally prepare herself for the onslaught of new responsibilities. It came as a surprise to me when she told me she had already written her resume and was already on the hunt for a new job, I mean I have discussed with her about the possibility of her leaving this place to find greener pastures in the past as a conversation starter but I didn't expect her to do it so soon, and her leaving would only make my leaving worst for the current bakers because that would mean they will have to handle not only double the amount of work but triple when I leave.




I'm already delaying my departure by working there till the rainbow cake promotion ends because I'm afraid if I leave now, it will really be a huge blow for the bakery because of how low manpower is in the bakery, if one person leaves, it's going to cripple the bakery for a while, but the idea of me staying there until after Christmas is fucking crazy. I mean even having to work an extra hour everyday is already making me very unhappy, the thought of having to work an extra 7 to 8 hours everyday in December is ridiculous.... and we are not even getting paid OT, how the bakery deals with OT is by allowing us to leave earlier on days when we aren't as busy, no one there keeps track of how many hours the bakers OT, so no one really knows how many hours we can claim really.




So working past August? NOT GONNA HAPPEN. Gonna give my two weeks notice probably on National Day. That's a good day to look forward to, finally get back to actually looking for a job that will pay me well, one that will allow me to survive in the future and afford me my own house.

A career switch soon again.

Work has been going well so far, wouldn't say it has gotten better, if anything it's probably gotten worse.



The good thing is that I have all the recipes memorized in my head, so there's no longer any need to refer to the recipe book anymore. That means if I were to open my own shop in the very distant future when I have too much money to spend, I will have bakery quality cakes to create and sell,



The bad thing now is I am starting to feel the dread of going to work to prepare the same cakes over and over again. It was fun in the beginning, mixing cake batters, portioning them out and seeing them rise evenly in the oven, but after a while, it just starts to feel a bit repetitive, so much so that I would rather watch paint dry.




I am no longer learning anything new in the bakery, or learning things that I am interested in.




The urge to leave this job and look for a new one is starting to get stronger everyday, to look for an office job where I don't actually have to work the whole day non stop, a job where I can take a few minutes break from whatever I am doing to surf the net for recreational purposes or go to the toilet and sit down in an empty cubicle for 10 minutes browsing through 9gag and still get paid for it, probably even more than I am earning right now.



So this will probably be the last job I will take as a baker or pastry cook or whatever position I am currently filling because working at the bakery doesn't feel like a real job, it feels like I am working a part time job during the school holidays, something that isn't permanent, something that will give me just enough money to buy the new PS4....  but I am at this point in my life where what I want is not a new PS4, what I want is sufficient money to get a car of my own in the future, to get a house and fill it with enough cats to make me less lonely... or a dog... or a kid from Africa.





When all this "wanting to follow my passion and bake for a career" thing happened, it was definitely something I needed to explore and experience, I mean I went to work in a design firm right after I came out from the army and because I knew I didn't give a career in baking a chance, I ended up regretting that decision and started to hate working there, it also didn't help that people there were generally unfriendly and some quite unbearable, but now that I have tried working in a restaurant and a bakery, I think it's suffice to say that I have given it a real shot, I mean I even went to get a professional certificate for it, which I still hadn't gone to collect yet because the school's admin staff is bloody incompetent.






So I will probably work for 3 more months in the bakery before giving submitting my resignation letter, look for a job in Interior Design, earn a decent living and maybe be able to complete my driving license and own my own car.