When you are good at your job, management sometimes think that the work you do just gets done like magic without giving it any thought.

What would you do if you were getting ready to quit when you had a baby, and your manager refused to hire someone to replace you so you could train them?

That is what happened to the cake decorator in this story, so she just left when she had the baby, and the entire department fell apart, costing the company thousands.

Don’t recognize my work? Have fun having no cake decorator during graduation season

I’ve been an assistant deli/bakery manager for +6 years.

She is going to be an awful manager, you just know it.

In those years we had “Jill” take over the previous managers position through backstabbery and lies, a position that was supposed to go to me, but she had a friend in upper management get her transferred over.

Jill never did any of the work, left things for me to do last minute, took four-day weekends, intentionally ‘missed’ orders to try and make me look bad; the whole nine yards.

Sometimes there is nothing you can do except tolerate a bad manager.

I put up with it for years… Every time I brought it up with the management, they gave an excuse or sort of just brushed me off. The company has a union, so getting someone with even a year of seniority over you in trouble is almost impossible.

I was doing more and more of the work, making sure orders went off on time, fixing ones she would forget or mess up, covering shifts, calling people to come in if she intentionally under scheduled us, training…. A headache.

Wow, what is this manager’s problem?

During this time, I got married (which she tried to deny me my vacation time to do) and had a hectic schedule that my husband graciously understood.

Dealt with it for another few years and just got so tired with everything… then the kicker came! I got pregnant with our first!!

I certainly can’t blame her, why would she want to go back?

I decided then and there that once I left for maternity, I wasn’t going back.

I did everything by the books, notified management and the union, scheduled doctors visits and worked around my schedule, made sure that there was no possible way she could mess with me.

Well, this worked out just perfectly.

Once I heard the due date; I grinned a maniacal smile deep in my soul. April… right before the busiest time for any deli/bakery… Graduation.

When you’re in a town with 3+ colleges and 4 high schools just in a ten mile radius, you get a LOT of orders to fill. I even had a reputation for color matching certain school colors and doing cakes last minute.

That is an insane number of cakes!

On any given day for those months, they could have anywhere from 15-150 cakes going out in a weekend (Friday-Sunday) and to make matters worse for them, I was the only cake decorator.

I let them know that they had to get someone in and hired for me to train MULTIPLE times or else they would be in dire straights, especially since Jill didn’t like decorating.

Of course, they won’t listen.

They never listened, like always. So, after four months, I stopped reminding them. I let it go. And it felt great.

Then I decided to use one of my vacations during the week before delivery (good thing I did, the baby was ready anyways) and they still hadn’t found a cake decorator.

When the baby is ready, there is no stopping it.

The day I delivered my baby, guess who finally got demoted???

Jill had scheduled one of her four-day weekends again, missed three supply orders, didn’t cover my shift, and the icing on the cake??? Left 19 cake orders unfulfilled for a Friday and did not let management know about them.

I feel terrible for the customers.

When Friday morning came around and she wasn’t there; there was a line of angry customers wondering WHERE their cakes were.

Upper store management was called in, people from two different departments who had “some” experience on cakes were pulling premade 1/4 sheets and randomly throwing sprinkled this way and that and giving out the cakes for free.

I guess the company should have listened and planned ahead.

Over $1000 in products having to be given to customers… for… free…

Apparently, this also happened on a day the district manager was set to come in and do a tour to make sure things were set up for graduation.

Lots of people losing their positions over this, as they should.

Needless to say she was demoted and moved from the department the very day she came back into the store ( she turned off her phone over the weekend so no one would disturb her)

I only know this because they called me to see if I could come back for a day or two from my “vacation” to fix everything. (They hadn’t known I had the baby yet, just thought I was still heavily pregnant).

I bet the baby is stressful too, but in a very good way.

I’ve now been six months as a STHM and cannot be happier without all of the stress from there.

They still ask if I want my old job back when I grocery shop there, but I just smile and tell them no thank you. (Although I do miss some of my coworkers) now I get to raise an amazing little boy and bake cakes for the fun of it now.

It never makes sense when a manager gets notified that someone is leaving and they do nothing to replace them. At least the manager in this story had some consequences.

Read on to see what the people in the comments say about it.

Yes, this was perfect.

Here is another cake decorator.

Now this is a good idea.

Right, it should be the easiest job in the world.

I do feel bad for those customers.

Now that’s what I call a sweet story.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.