In the summer of 1991, I worked at an industrial bakery in west Toronto. It was a dated, three-story brick building that sprawled over three city blocks. I spent eight hours a day, five days a week, standing in a fruit-cake assembly line sprinkling assorted candied fruit atop an endless stream of baking pans. There was flour dust everywhere. We wore hair-nets and masks. The heat emanating from the industrial ovens on a humid night often made work unbearable. Droplets of sweat mixed with airborne flour making tiny balls of dough atop the hairs on my forearms. Our only respite was an occasional breeze of cool night air that would float through a bank of large windows facing south on to Dupont Street. It was a mind-numbing job but it paid enough and I needed to save up for tuition. Over and over, I would pick up a handful of candied fruit and spread them over the top of the dough. I would do this from 3:30pm until 11:30pm. We had two breaks and a twenty minute lunch. It was union policy that we would alternate stations on the line but the foreman ignored the rules. We rarely complained. Some of us were far better and faster at some tasks than others. Sometimes I would be switched to pecans. A portly Croatian woman with a kind face named Majda, however, would always be the smoother. She would hold a piece of four-inch wide Plexiglass, dip it in a bucket of warm water, and run it over the top of the lumpy, raw dough. She would then pass the smoothened cake dough in its pan down the line to me. Majda was a full-timer. She was fast but not particularly cheery. She sat on a stool. The rest of us had to stand. The foreman would bring her coffee. He never brought coffee to the rest of us. She took shorter breaks than the fifteen minutes mandated. She even urged the rest of us to hurry up when we took too long getting back to our stations. “Don't be lazy,” she'd say and, “We don't get paid to sit.” I would have hated her but she reminded me of my mother.