Lemon Cake, and the Strange Business of Working Together

She came back from holiday and the work was waiting for her.

Not politely waiting. Not in a small pile. It was sitting there heavily, already late, already complicated. The banking system had not worked properly the week before, and now it was only just starting to behave again. Since yesterday, it was better for her, but not for everyone. Her colleagues who worked with Norway and Sweden were still stuck, waiting for the system to open its eyes.

So the week felt chaotic. A little cowish, she said first, and then corrected herself. Chaotic. Yes, that was the word.

It was also the end of the month, which never comes quietly. There were credit limits to check, customers to follow, messages to answer, and now one colleague was preparing to fly to Mexico for more than two weeks. She could already feel the extra work coming toward her.

At home, her daughter was there in the afternoon because school was closed on Wednesday afternoons. She was baking a lemon cake. At first, she called it citrus, then lemon, and there was laughter in the kitchen somewhere behind the workday. Her daughter also had school interviews coming, and there would be travelling, not once but several times, because each school had its own days and hours. Nothing was simple. Even choosing a school had its own timetable.

The conversation moved to work in different countries, but for her it was not an abstract thing. It was something she had seen in real life, in the same company, with people doing the same job but not in the same way.

A colleague from Belgium had visited France and noticed it too. The work was the same, but the style was different. In France, some of the older colleagues still printed everything. Documents, orders, notes — all on paper, all filed away. In one way, it was useful. If she asked for an old document, they could sometimes find it quickly because it was there, in a file, in their hands.

But it also made her uneasy.

If the documents were only in France, and the people retired, then what happened next? She could not search for the information herself. She had to bother someone, ask someone, wait for someone. In Germany, it felt different. The documents were in the system. She knew where to look. She could find the order, check the information, contact the customer, and continue.

Still, she understood the paper. She liked paper too, but not to keep everything forever. Sometimes she printed things because a customer account was a real mess, and she needed to see it in front of her. She needed to write comments, make small marks, understand it with her hands as much as with her eyes.

Every day, she had a paper with what she planned to do. At the end of the day, if things were done, she liked to delete them, cross them out, clear them away. It gave her a picture of the day. What was finished. What was still waiting.

Then the body reminded her that work is not only in the head.

Her sciatic nerve was painful. She had wanted to run the evening before, but she could only walk. Too much sitting. Sitting all day at work, then sitting again for a three-hour council meeting about the budget. She came home at ten o’clock at night with her back sore and her head full of numbers.

The meeting was interesting, yes. It was the first time she had really learned how the council worked. They spoke about the financial situation, the plans for the year, what they wanted to invest in, what they could afford. They had to vote on the new budget. And they all agreed on one thing: they did not want to raise the taxes.

That would not be good. People would not like that.

Somewhere between budgets and work cultures, the lemon cake was still happening. Then the oven stopped. The electricity had gone off in part of the house because the oven had a problem when it was too hot. She had to go and switch the power back on. It was one of those small interruptions that belongs completely to daily life. Work on the screen, cake in the oven, daughter nearby, electricity gone, back again.

She said they needed a new oven. Enough was enough.

There was also talk about water. In South Africa, she heard, water and electricity could be switched off for repairs, with messages on an app and tickets logged when something went wrong. Pipes were being replaced, cables repaired, and sometimes there was no water during the day until five or six in the evening.

She imagined the practical part immediately. Toilets. Cooking. Washing. You had to keep water somewhere, just in case. A bin outside for flushing. Water in the fridge. The kettle filled before the water disappeared. It was not dramatic, just inconvenient and very real. And if someone had gastroenteritis on such a day, then it was not funny at all. She knew that too. She and her daughter had both been sick like that once when there was no water.

That was a real problem.

The idea of afternoon naps came next. Mandatory naps at work. She could understand the logic. After lunch, there is sometimes that low point, when concentration slips and the body becomes heavy. In some countries, maybe it works. In Japan, she had heard, small naps were more accepted. In Spain or the south of France, perhaps also.

But not where she lived. Not in her mentality.

The weekend was different. On the weekend, a small nap was possible, depending on the night before. But at work? Closing the office door and sleeping? No. She could not imagine it.

She remembered a man in Germany who did it every day. He had only a thirty-minute break. He ate quickly, then he slept on the table, using only a carton as a pillow. Every day. She could not understand how he managed it.

Work culture, she thought, was full of these strange little habits. Some people are strict about time. Some are relaxed if someone is five or ten minutes late, as long as the work is done. In her company there was not much control, no boss standing there watching the minutes. People worked, and that was what mattered. If someone arrived a little late, they stayed a little later. It balanced.

Germany felt stricter to her. More correct. More organised. If something was different in the accounts, it had to be solved. In other places, perhaps it could sit there for a while and not be treated as such a big problem. She had seen that when she worked with rebates for German customers. It was complicated sometimes, with contracts and goals and money back, companies joining or leaving groups, forecasts in the middle of the year. But it was always done properly. People even told her: Germany is fine. Germany is done.

She was born in France, but she worked in Germany. So maybe she had a little German way of thinking now. Not German, no. Really not German. But a little of that mentality had settled into her work.

She liked the international environment. She liked hearing different accents in English. Spanish, French, German, Belgian — everyone carried their own sound into the same language. English made the work possible, because nobody could learn every local language. Still, sometimes she used DeepL to write a sentence in Spanish or French for a customer, and by doing that she learned a little. Not enough to speak the language fully, but enough to feel the shape of it.

She noticed that daily vocabulary was harder than business vocabulary. Business words came every day. Credit limits, invoices, rebates, customers, systems. But simple things at home could disappear from her mind. That morning, she had searched for the word carpet. The word was there somewhere, but she could not find it.

That bothered her.

By the end of the conversation, the big questions about global work culture had become mixed with normal life: a daughter’s lemon cake, a broken oven, a sore back, public holidays, buses and trains not running, tennis waiting later in the day.

That is how work really feels, maybe. Not separate from life. It sits beside the cake, the school interviews, the bad chair, the water in the fridge, the paper list on the desk.

And when the cake was finally ready, she still had tennis first. After that, maybe she could take a small piece. Not too much. Just enough.