I am sweating. My pristine white jacket is soaked through with dishwater and suds. I wipe my raw hands on the disgusting beige apron and immediately regret it; it’s wet, scratchy, and faintly smells like old sanitizer and defeat.
Tess emerges from the kitchen with a clipboard. She does not look at me.
She walks straight to the stack of clean boxes, picks one at random, and inspects it. Runs a finger along the inside groove. Holds it up to the new morning light.
“Ready for your next task?” she asks.
“Sure. What can I do?” I ask.
She glares. “The delivery pallet. In the alley. I need you to move it to dry storage.”
She points to a dark hallway I hadn’t noticed before, near the back. “Dry storage is the first door on the left. Stack them neatly.”
I nod, wiping my wet hands on my pants like that will somehow undo chemical burns and the existential collapse of my dignity. I walk down the hall and push open the heavy, metal-plated back door.
The smell of the bakery, cinnamon, coffee, and cardamom, is instantly replaced by the sharp, damp, gritty odor of a Chicago alley at six a.m. The cold bites at my damp clothes. A single flickering fluorescent light illuminates the small concrete loading dock.
And there, on a massive wooden pallet, is a stack of fifty-pound bags of flour.
There are… a lot of them. At least twenty.
One thousand pounds of flour.
I stare at the stack. Look down at my red, stinging, manicured hands. Look back into the warm, fragrant bakery where Tess is now expertly scoring a row of bread loaves with a small, sharp blade, movements fast and precise, like a surgeon.
“Ok,” I whisper to the bags. This is my job.
I bend my knees,thank you, five-hundred-dollars-an-hour personal trainer, grab the first bag, and hoist.
It is heavy. Not conceptually heavy. Not “the weight of responsibility.” Not “leadership is lonely.” Actually, physically, horribly heavy. The fifty-pound bag feels like two hundred. I stagger, the coarse paper scratching my cheek as I wrestle it onto my shoulder. My tailored white jacket strains at the seams.
I stumble back inside, down the hall, into the dry storage room.
It is small, tight, meticulously organized, with floor-to-ceiling shelves. I heave the bag onto the bottom shelf. A cloud of flour puffs out and settles on my damp hair like a very angry ghost has blessed me.
I go back. Grab another. And another.
This is the most real, most physical work I have done in my entire adult life. My work is emails. Phone calls. Staring at data until my eyes burn. The intellectual stress of moving billions of dollars.
This is different. This is gravity.
With every trip, my pants get dirtier, picking up grime from the alley and a fine, ghostly coating of flour. My back, already aching, is now screaming. My split thumbnail throbs with every bag I grip.
I do not stop.
I just move.
Alley to storage. Storage to alley.
I am a ghost. A ghost who hauls.
Through the doorway, I watch Tess and Gwen as I work. They are a machine. A two-woman, high-efficiency, artisanal machine. They don’t just move; they flow. Gwen folds and turns massive sheets of laminated dough, her movements creating invisible layers of butter and flour. Tess loads the massive convection oven in a flurry of motion, pulling out trays of golden-brown morning buns and sliding racks of sourdough in, while shouting instructions to Gwen over the roar of the fans.
“Gwen, check the proof on the baguettes!”
“Pulling the twists in two, boss!”
“Did you prep the egg wash?”
