RSS feedYou know, Baker’s Delight, our local franchised gourmet baker, are single handedly responsible for bringing the bread making profession into the modern era. Well, them and other businesses like them.
Not twenty years ago, a baker was, along with the candlestick makers, a middle ages profession and a pretty bad career move for the modern upwardly mobile job seeker. Or at least that’s the impression I had as a youngster. Men in funny white hats, big wooden spatulas in hand, pushing balls of freshly kneeded dough into a hot clay oven, as knights on horseback ride past, jousting lances in hand.
Then the supermarkets got into the act, with their plastic wrapped chemically treated and almost clinically sliced bread, with all the taste of plasterboard. For all intents, you’d assume there was no longer such a thing as a baker.
Anyway, gourmet bakers have done wonders for a new generation of McDonalds workers looking for a better career experience. You can’t get more traditional than a baker.
I visited our local a few days ago, and carefully analysed the various loaves they had under the fluorescent “make it look fresher” trick lighting, when I was served by one of the actual bakers:
Baker: What can I get you?
R: Well, I’d love a twisted delight, but they’re all a bit burnt today.
Baker: Burnt?! That’s not burnt, that’s caramelised!
R: Fine, well I’ll have a not burnt twisted delight thanks, and make it caramelised will you.
I can tell you, there’s a pretty fine line between caramelised and, well… burnt. But then we’re pretty pedantic in software as well.
User: The program crashed.
Support: OK, can you be a little more specific? Did it hang, loop, break, abort, quit, reboot, not launch, exit, fail, slow down, or just not give you the results you were expecting?
User: Umm… I don’t know, it just doesn’t work.
I’m probably the most pedantic person I know when it comes to the use of language, perhaps tied with a few notable exceptions, and I’m telling you, that twisted delight was burnt.