Chapter 4 - weigh-in

The following morning I headed down to the QC station to catch up with Jerry and check on that mysterious non-compliant product. I knew that the weekly Quality team meeting would be finishing around 9am, so I arrived just before that to catch the end of it. The scene that met my eyes wasn’t quite what I was expecting – and it immediately answered my question.

Jerry was standing at the front of the room, finishing a quick run-down of the figures and management priorities for the week. He didn’t see me come through the door and continued, “…and, of course, we have one more point of business on the agenda. Up you come, Cream Puff.”

The overweight girl got awkwardly to her feet, eyes downcast and a nervous smile on her face, and walked to the front of the room. There were a few laughs and claps from the team.

“OK everyone,” said Jerry cheerfully, pointing to a large laminated chart among the performance indicators on the wall. “If you recall, last week our newest recruit had continued her – frankly astounding – progress, and reached a total product mass increase of 40%. Let’s see what another week of hard graft has done for her. On the scales, Cream Puff.”

Without a word, the plump girl climbed up and sat on the large stainless-steel weighing scale which was usually used to check average batch weights. She was facing her colleagues and couldn’t see the digital read-out behind her. As it blinked and settled on a number, there was a loud cheer from the assembled audience.

“She’s gained another two and a half kilograms in a week – that’s almost six pounds!” Proclaimed Jerry. “So, the great pig-out continues and shows no signs of stopping, eh, big girl?”

Cream Puff sat there red-faced on the weighing scale with her colleagues openly laughing at her. She tried to muster a carefree grin and patted the big mound of her belly, which bulged in two great rolls into her lap. “It just goes to show,” she joked unconvincingly, “we’re making irresistible products here!”

“We can all see that you can’t resist them, that’s for sure!” laughed Jerry. He picked up a red board marker and carefully plotted a point on the graph, writing ‘44%’ in large letters above it. “OK, everyone, that concludes the team meeting. You can get down now, greedy-guts. Let’s get back to work.”

So – the new product that I hadn’t recognised, which was expanding week by week, was none other than Cream Puff! And she was obviously playing along, suffering this humiliation every week, and pretending it was all just hilarious workplace banter.

Cream Puff clambered down from the scales and jiggled back to her seat, eyes on the floor. I walked to the front of the room as the crowd dispersed.

“Wow, Jerry – that was quite a performance. Are you really doing that to her every week?”

He grinned devilishly. “She thinks it’s a site tradition – that the newest member of the team has their weight tracked, because of the famous ‘newbie gain’. We haven’t told her that it’s a brand new tradition, especially for her!”

I couldn’t help laughing along with my buddy. “She really has let herself go, hasn’t she! Did she really gain nearly half of her original bodyweight?”

“Sure did,” Jerry replied, “and she it looks like she’s just going to continue. Look at her right now.”

I turned around and saw Cream Puff absent-mindedly cramming a pain-au-chocolat between her plump pink lips. She glanced up and saw me watching, but her mouth was full and there was nothing she could do but chew and swallow, holding my gaze for a moment with guilty eyes.

“Man,” summarised Jerry, “She’s let herself turn into a real fatty.” A thought struck him. “Oh hey, speaking of which – you’ll never guess who’s in town next weekend. Mark! We should go for a beer and see if he’s still such a loser.”

I’m not proud of this, but Mark was the kid we kind-of bullied at school. At the time, we genuinely didn’t think of it as bullying – he was the chubby kid with slightly weird parents, and we thought he was just lucky to be allowed to hang around with us at all. But looking back, the whole school experience was probably quite tough for him. He was relentlessly on the receiving end of our stupid schoolboy humour, he was the least successful with girls, and even the teachers seemed to be more short-tempered with him. He was just an easy kid to pick on, and even though we felt it was all good-natured back then, I can now see that he put up with a lot. Anyway, we hadn’t seen him in years, but I’d heard that he joined the army, where he got massively into physical training. Now he was back on civvie street and apparently running some kind of fitness boot camp, where rich women with no self-motivation paid him to wear camouflage trousers and beast them up and down a city park. It would be interesting to see what kind of guy Mark had grown up to be.