I almost got blown up at work. Twice. In two days.
But that’s the end of the story. Let me start where it really began — because the truth is, everything that went wrong was written on the wall before I ever took the job. I just decided not to read it.
It started as a dream. A brand-new boutique café — coffee, fresh baked goods, local art on the walls, the kind of place a whole neighborhood falls in love with. I’d be building the entire baking operation from scratch. For someone like me, that’s the good stuff. Opening a new place is my favorite thing in the world.
The owner was a retired professional reinventing herself. She’d hired a former colleague to handle HR and help her get the place staffed — and that woman, for whatever reason, was pulling for me. She set up my interview, gave me a few pointers, quietly wanted me to get it. That should have felt good. And it did.
But during the interview, the owner leaned in and told me something strange. She hadn’t told her son I was coming in.
I remember thinking, what does her son have to do with me getting hired as a baker? I didn’t ask. That was my first mistake.
Then she went further. She told me her son was difficult — that he could be cruel to her — and asked if I’d be willing to stand up to him if it came to that.
Sit with that for a second. Before I’d even accepted the job, my future boss was asking me, a stranger, to protect her from her own child.
And then, right on cue, he walked in. Loud. Disheveled. Carrying himself like the most important man in the room. He went straight for my sample tray and ate half of it in about thirty seconds, barely looking at me.
Everything in my body said no. Every alarm I’d earned over twenty years in kitchens was ringing.
But the pay was excellent. And I loved opening new places. So I did what so many of us do when the money’s good and the dream is shiny — I ignored every single warning sign, and I said yes.