Caker Problem #53 – You’re late!

If you’ve been caking for a while, you’ll know that customers request some crazy things. Like “Can I order 24 cupcakes, but in six different flavours?”. “I need a cake to feed 200 people, but I only want a two tier, and I don’t like the idea of a kitchen cake”. “Do you think you could possibly let us borrow one of your cake stands? With no bond or anything, you know I’ll bring it back!”. My favourite “Could we just get 3 gluten free cupcakes, for some of our guests? What do you mean you would have to charge me for a batch? We don’t need 24!”. Sometimes it really makes my head hurt. But when you mess with my schedule, and my sleep, you’ve gone too far lady!

Now, I can understand being 10 minutes late. I’m rarely ever one minute late, but I try to be understanding when other people are. I could see how, on a busy party day, you could even get half an hour behind. But if you say you’re going to pick up a cake at 7:30am, and you “rock up” at noon, you’ll be lucky if I even hand the cake over at all. How can you be four and a half hours behind, that early in your day? Not even Doctors run that late, and I secretly think they hold tournaments where the person who has made a patient wait the longest, gets a night out and a bottle of champagne.

You just changed your whole morning, and didn’t bother to tell the one person who got less hours sleep that night than you have eyes in your head. You’re most likely already paying this person less then half what the cake should be worth. That little pirate figurine you had to have made out of fondant, took 2 hours to create. And the fact that your toddler swiped it off the top at pickup and ripped it’s head off, does little to make a caker feel valued. “Did you make a spare?” Really? “Did YOU make a spare?!” I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that. I’m going to turn my arse around, flop on my bed, and sleep for 3 hours while my kids do whatever it is they do when I pass out after cake pickup. More than likely watch some Anime or play Minecraft. They could be plotting to take over the world for all I know. While they do that, I’m going to be laying in a puddle of drool on top of my covers, saying to myself, “I’ve got to get me some better clients..”