The past couple of days at work have been teaching me a great deal of lessons in micro-managing. Yesterday, our baker goofed on one of our cupcakes and it wasn't until the CFO came in and ATE one of them that we found out something was very wrong. This was frustrating to me because 1) the baker knows that she is supposed to try one of every cupcake to make sure that everything is right 2) the people frosting the cupcakes should have noticed that they were not up to par and should not have frosted them 3) I failed to micro-manage and did not check the quality of the product before we opened for the day. Today I got a phone call from my baker at 5am saying she had a flat tire but that AAA was on the way. I told her to keep me posted. She called me back 10 minutes later to tell me that they wouldn't be there until 5:40. I got dressed and headed into work to get the bake started (I wasn't scheduled to come in until 9am but I wasn't about to have the day start off where we would be constantly playing catch up.) I left at 6:30am and came home and went back to sleep for a little bit and then went back to work. The baker made sure to taste the cupcakes this morning and then I thought we were off to a good start. I made sure to micro-manage the girls when they were decorating the cakes because there have been issues with "birthday" being mis-spelled or forgetting to pipe a boarder or just not following directions. I let one girl do a special cookie order that needed to be decorated with black royal icing (powdered sugar and egg whites) and have an inscription written on them. That's where things went wrong. I didn't check her final product and the Executive Baker came into the store and noticed that the inscription was done in buttercream. I have no idea why this girl would have used buttercream instead of royal icing. The cookies could not be saved and we had to cut new ones to bake and frost for the order to be picked up tomorrow. Needless to say I am glad that today is Friday and that I have tomorrow off. Micro-managing seems to be the management style that I am going to have to adopt from now on because I can't seem to rely on my team to work independently. My job would be easier if I could clone myself, fire the others and then hire more of me! Anyway, Mom and Dad I'm sure you have some good advice (because you always do!) that you'll give me about this situation the next time I talk to you but for now, here are my latest cakes: