I’ve spent forty years in corporate offices, you know? Dealing with boardrooms and those god-awful performance reviews where everyone uses ten words when one would do. So when I retired, I thought, I’m finally going to do something real. I’m going to make croissants. Not the supermarket kind, but the kind that take three days and make a total mess of the kitchen. And now I have this shop, this little boutique place that everyone raves about and the line is out the door, but every time a "real" chef walks in—you know, the ones with the fancy degrees and the thousand-dollar knives—I just want to crawl under the counter and hide. It’s ridiculous because I’m seventy years old. I shouldn't care what some twenty-four-year-old in a crisp white coat thinks, but I see them looking at my lamination, poking at the crumb, and suddenly I’m back in 1985 trying to prove I belong at the executive table. I taught myself everything from YouTube and old cookbooks I found at estate sales. I didn't spend fifty grand to learn how to dice an onion, I just... did it. And people love them! They pay eight bucks a pop and tell me it’s the best thing they’ve ever eaten. But when those pros come in and start talking about "hydration percentages" and "cold-bulk fermentation," I just nod and pray they don't ask where I apprenticed. Last Tuesday, this guy comes in. Total prick, had that look—you know the one—where he’s basically smelling the air for mistakes. He buys a plain croissant, takes it to the corner table, and just... dissects it. Like he’s performing an autopsy. I’m standing there behind the espresso machine, heart hammering like I’m about to give a quarterly projection to a room full of sharks, and I’m thinking, he’s gonna know. He’s gonna taste that I used a rolling pin instead of a five-thousand-dollar sheeter because I like the "feel" of the dough. He’s going to realize I’m just a grandma who got lucky with a sourdough starter. He came up after and said the honeycomb was "technically interesting" and asked where I studied. I just told him I was "self-directed" and he gave me this look—this tiny, condescending smirk—and said, "Ah, a hobbyist then." I wanted to tell him to shove his technical interest up his nose.