I work in a bakery in Sydney’s west as the head baker. I really like my job, which often shocks people as I have to work nights. I love working nights. When I finish work at 9am I have a full seven hours to enjoy my day before I have to go to sleep ready for my next shift. It’s really quite enjoyable and it suits my lifestyle immensely. I really do love it.
My only issue with my job is how horribly cold the bakery is at 1am when I arrive at work. It could be freezing in the dead of winter, and I’ll go inside the bakery and be even colder than I was outside. The bakery is essentially a metal room that holds little-to-no heat at any given time. That is why I’m going to ask my boss if we can install a bakery friendly central ducted heating. Sydney bakeries have plenty of temperature regulations that they need to follow, which includes the air around us, so that the bread rises correctly. However, I’m sure there is a way that we can figure out how to meet these regulations whilst improving my wellbeing at work. It usually takes me the first two hours to get feeling back into my fingers, which is making it very difficult to do the job I love.
Seeing as there’s understandably tough regulations around bakery temperatures, I’m going to also propose that we have a designated, on-call heating technician available to us should we need any heating repairs. Sydney is a very busy city, so it wouldn’t be out of the realm of expectation that a technician would visit us in the middle of the night. This will help my case a lot, knowing that the heating system will not be a detriment to the quality of the bread or how sanitary our bakery is. I’m going to ask him after my shift ends tomorrow. I will keep you all posted.