Aibu to feel upset - work

[ImNotUseless]

My colleagues think I’m useless. We are a team of 10. I won’t go into detail as the industry would be very outing but I’ll try and find a comparison.

Let’s say my job is a bakery. They make all sorts of things. I replied to a role for ‘Victoria sponge expert’ and got the job. I had been trained at ‘the Victoria sponge institute and did a masters in it’. A couple of people there had done short courses there but let’s say I really really know how to make a perfect Victoria sponge but am not that good at much else.

None of the staff ever gets to eat anything made on site. So no one can really taste what anyone else’s food tastes like, but you can obviously see what’s burnt etc.

Even though I was hired to bake Victoria sponges my manager says we have just taken on a contract to supply bread and scones to a local school. We occasionally need cakes for the staff room but it is mostly bread. The cakes I make sell for 30 but the bread is a pound a loaf. The manager says we need all hands on deck to make bread.

So I make bread. However I’m not that good at it. I can make 5 loaves an hour. They are ok. The rest of the team can make 30 an hour, many of them are burnt and shitty but they bung them out. Whoever picks up the phone will make scones or vanilla sponges when asked. I can make 5 sponges an hour. They are the best sponges people have ever tasted. No one on the team gets to taste them. Sometimes they need scones and generally John makes those because John has always made them. Mine are pretty much as good as Johns.

Sometimes they will ask for 100 Victoria Sponges. The whole team will make some. Some will be shitty, some will be perfect but no one can tell which is mine.

The job is next to my house and the hours are perfect for school run the pay is meh. If I went to be a specific Victoria sponge maker elsewhere the pay would be about double but the Victoria sponge making industry does not tend to offer flexi working.

I am quite mousy and quiet. I can only make 5 loaves an hour. I make excellent cakes but no one apart from the boss knows. I know they think I’m lazy/slacker/useless because I can only make 5 loaves an hour. I don’t know what to do.

The bakery is just an example as I don’t want to say my actual job.

Thanks for all the responses. I’m writing a proposal for my boss basically saying what pp said.
Me do all sponge!
The thing is, other team members like making sponges as it’s more fun and you get to lick the bowl .

I’ve been training for years and paid thousands for that skill so I should get to lick the fucking bowl!

I know I should play the game and bung out shitty misshapen loaves but I can’t bring myself to send shitty work out into the wold.

I think the language analogy is good. They don’t understand the language so you could be speaking gibberish as far as they are aware.

I don’t have confidence in myself enough to retrain or expand :-( .

Well, good luck with the letter and I hope it gets you what you want, but be prepared that they might not be keen to let you do only the things you want and refuse to diversify.

I'm afraid I agree that if I were your boss I'd be unimpressed that you don't appear to be prepared to develop your skills in other areas. It's important to be able to respond to changing business need and there appears to be limited scope for Victoria sponges. I think you should be asking for support to get up to speed with the skills the company needs.
For example, this week we are between contracts in my niche role at work but two people who perform a different role are sick. I have willingly taken on their work, pulled with the team to support my manager and the project, volunteered for tasks without being asked and asked for guidance if unsure. That's what a good team member does.

I need to know what your job is

You either need to go be a specialist sponge maker somewhere else or accept that this job is not that job and get better at churning out loaves

It’s not usually in the interests of the business to have only one person doing a particular task because then if they are sick/on holiday/leave then nobody else can do it. Plus if sponges are the more desirable task then your colleagues won’t be happy that you get to do all of them while not doing the high volume loaves.