Chapter 1 - the new hire

A couple of years ago I was working as the Production Manager at an industrial bakery – my site was close to the small town where I grew up, but was part of a large concern that provided all kinds of bread and pastries to distributors and retailers. If you ate a hotel breakfast croissant, a McDoughnut or a part-baked roll from a supermarket anywhere in the country around that time, there’s a good chance it came from my plant. We produced them on a mass scale, and the public munched as many as we could make. I won’t take full credit for the obesity epidemic, but if I’m honest, we weren’t helping.

One of the most attractive places in the factory to be employed was the main Quality Control (QC) station. The work was easy enough – we ran a good factory, so quality issues were few and far between. What’s more, our standard operating procedures meant that a whole tray of product had to be pulled off the production line for every quality test – so there were always dozens of perfect, warm, fresh pastries for the QC staff to dispose of as they wished. Their friends and family benefited – not to mention the staff themselves, most of whom gained a few pounds pretty rapidly after they started.

One winter we had a QC vacancy to fill, so I interviewed three or four candidates. One of them really stood out – and I don’t mind saying, for completely the wrong reasons. She lit up my office when she walked in. She was simply gorgeous – the kind of girl you don’t often see in our little town. She had light golden-blonde hair and a creamy pale complexion with healthily rosy cheeks; I guessed that she was of Scandinavian extraction. Her eyes were large, blue and heavily-lashed, and she had very full pink lips. She gave an impression of vigour and vitality, and I half-expected to read on her CV that she enjoyed mountain-climbing and hiking. However, as she removed her thick coat, I could immediately see that she wasn’t quite the hard-bodied athlete I had anticipated. She had an hourglass figure, with a defined waist and sensuously swelling breasts and hips. Although she was only just verging on overweight, she certainly had curves in all the right places.

If I’m honest, I don’t recall much of the interview. I remember trying to probe why she was interested in a junior QC job, as she was somewhat over-qualified. She chewed her plump lower lip for a moment as if nervous, then smiled and said, “Well, I have been applying for roles that are more specific to my studies, but I’ll be honest, the job market is difficult at the moment. I’ve been unemployed for a while, so I decided to try and work my way up in a large company that does something I’m passionate about.” She paused for a second and bit that pillowy lower lip again. “And believe me, I’m passionate about food!”

I was sold. I should say that I’ve always had an attraction to bigger women – and knowing the effect this job tended to have on the employees’ waistlines, all I could think about was how this stunning girl would look carrying an extra 20 or 30 pounds on her curvy frame. An HR tribunal would have disagreed, but it was reason enough for me. I hired her on the spot.

After she had left, beaming with delight to have got the job, I took a walk down to the factory floor, where Line 1 was running a batch of part-baked cream puffs. Lost in thought, I gazed at each machine in turn. I watched the cream-coloured dough being folded with butter, stretched and kneaded, rolled into round white bulges. I caught myself imagining my new hire’s body – the pale skin, the softness of her breasts and buttocks. I watched the mechanical injector plunge into the pliable dough-balls and pump each one full of sweet butter-cream. Then I watched as the cream puffs were proved, and the soft pastry began to rise and swell upwards, bulging over the hard metal edges of the tray. I found myself hoping that the new girl’s belly would expand in the same way, after a few months’ access to free cakes and pastries. I shook myself and went back to work.