Orders come off the system, the flour is weighed against them, and the despatch notes are signed by the driver who takes the tray. One line on one order is for a product code that was retired before I started.
I am the night production manager of a plant bakery. We run from nine at night until six in the morning and we put out about forty thousand units a night.
Nothing here is decided by a person at night. The orders come off the system at about eight in the evening, consolidated from the depots, as a production run: product code, quantity, and the time it has to be on the bay.
The system then drives everything else. The flour silos meter against the recipe for each code. The tin sets are changed to match. The labels are printed from the code. And at the other end the despatch notes are printed from the same order, and the driver signs for what he takes.
So a product code is not a label on a shelf. It is a recipe, a tin, a label, a despatch line and an invoice line, and all five come from the same row in the same table.
Every Friday night there is a line on the order for product code 114.
Forty eight units. Always forty eight, which is four trays of twelve.
Code 114 is a large white tin loaf, hand finished, on a recipe that came off our list in 1998.
I know the date because I looked it up, and because the man who told me about it first had been here since 1989.
It was a regional line for a chain of independent grocers, and the chain went in the late nineties, and the code was retired. I have seen the product specification in the archive: a 1.5 kilo white tin, a particular tin set, and a hand finish which means somebody puts a cut in the top with a blade instead of the machine scoring it.
The specification is in the archive because nothing gets deleted, which is completely normal. What is not normal is that the code is in the live product table, flagged active, with a recipe and a tin set and a label.
So we bake it.
That is the part nobody outside this industry understands. There is no decision available. The order says forty eight of 114, so the silos meter a 1.5 kilo white dough for forty eight, and the tin sets come out of the rack, and one of my bakers does the hand finish because somebody has to and because it is on the spec.
Forty eight loaves, every Friday, on a line we stopped selling when I was eleven.
What I did about it when I took over in 2019.
I tried to take it off the order. That is a buying system function and I do not have it, so I raised it with the commercial team, twice, and the answer both times was that there is a standing order against the code and that standing orders are not removed without the customer's agreement.
I asked who the customer was. The account is a depot code we do not use any more, and the contact name on it is a name, and the phone number is eight digits, which has not been a valid local number since the 1990s.
I put that in an email in 2020 and the reply was that the account was clearly dormant and that the line should be reviewed in the next range rationalisation.
There have been three range rationalisations. 114 is on the order this Friday.
The part that keeps me awake, which is not the baking.
The forty eight go on a tray stack on bay 4 with a despatch note on them.
And they go.
The note comes back signed. Not a scribble: a signature, the same one every week, and a printed name underneath in the box where the driver writes his name in capitals.
I do not recognise the name and neither does the transport manager, and we have checked it against every driver on our own fleet and every agency driver who has worked here since 2017.
I have been on bay 4 for it.
Eleven times over six years. It goes between 04:10 and 04:40, which is a gap in the despatch schedule because the main runs go at three and five.
Nine of those eleven times I was looking at the stack and then I was looking at a different part of the bay for a moment and then the stack was gone and the note was on the desk. That sounds like the least convincing sentence in this, and I know it, and I can only tell you that a bay at four in the morning has fourteen people and nine stacks moving and a tug tractor going past every ninety seconds, and that a man looking at one stack for twenty minutes is a man not doing his job.
Twice I watched it properly. Both times a flatbed came onto the bay, reversed, and a driver got out and loaded four trays by hand, which nobody does, because you roll a stack on.
Both times I was about nine metres away with a clipboard.
The first time I said good morning and he said good morning.
The second time I asked him which depot he was for and he said a name I did not catch over the line noise, and he got in and went, and the note was signed in the box on the desk and the trays were gone.
What I have settled on.
The cost of forty eight loaves is about eleven pounds of ingredients and twenty minutes of one baker's time, and the order carries an invoice line, and the invoice goes out.
I have asked finance whether it is paid. They said the account settles monthly by direct debit and has never been in arrears.
So the bakery is up on the deal, the same as every other line we run, and nobody anywhere in this company has a reason to change anything, and the only person in the building who thinks about it is me.
What I do now is make sure it is done properly. The hand finish is on the spec and for two years it was being done badly, because a baker given a tin set he has never seen and a spec from 1996 does a reasonable job and no better.
I do it myself now. Four trays, twelve to a tray, one cut down the middle with a blade, the depth the spec says, and I put them on the stack square.
If somebody is going to collect forty eight loaves off my bay every Friday for the rest of my working life, they are going to be right.