Lots of people losing jobs lately. GM plans to part with a few. Washington Mutual bank has let go 7,300 since December. And the newspaper business isn’t quite healthy at the moment.

Which means, of course, that a lot of people are eating goodbye cakes in workplaces across the country.

For me,  the definitive cinematic representation of the cake-devouring experience in a professional setting was captured in the immortal 1999 classic “Office Space.”

::: Note to self: Find my stapler. :::

We’ve had a lot of send-offs lately here at the Tribune, unfortunately. I think we charted a 4-trillion-calorie week not long ago that was directly attributed to cake consumption.

Being the word snobs that we are - Hey, we’re in the letters, syntax and punctuation business. This stuff matters. - it’s always a hoot when a cake fails to achieve it’s intended graphical standard of perfection.

Take this cake from last year, which we gave to our colleague Amy before she left to join the teaching ranks:

Purple. Flowery. Heavy on the icing. Just about the right size to feed a couple dozen newsroom mouths. Looks perfect.

Uh, oh. Wait a tick…

Ah. Someone took the double parentheses and double quote marks literally on the order sheet. Oh, and they missed a comma after “Luck.” Only a room full of word people would probably notice that.

All of which got me thinking about some off the best of the worst goodbye cakes I’ve seen on the Web:



10. THE LOST IN TRANSLATION CAKE

This is the granddaddy of going away cakes, the Rosetta stone with icing, as it were. E-mailed around the globe, plunked on a billion blogs for laffs and guffaws, it most closely resembles our Amy cake in it’s literal translation of what some procrastinator probably phoned in to Wal-Mart from the office the day Suzanne was supposed to leave.

By the color scheme, I’d guess it was sometime around Thanksgiving.

9. THE ONE LAST SHOT CAKE

Okay, so Andy probably hit on one too many secretaries during T.G.I. Friday’s happy hour. The contrast between the well-wishes and the effort it took to not only find the exact emasculating photo that would express the office’s clear disdain for the jerk and then have it printed on the cake in color - probably at an extra cost of about $12.99 that everyone had to chip in for - stands as a testament to this gent’s lack of sexual decorum in the office setting.

8. SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEART’S CLUB CAKE

There’s an archetype in every office: That person who, when no one can decide exactly what kind of cake to buy, volunteers to make one at home. Why not? That person watches “Ace of Cakes” on Food Network. Couldn’t be that hard, right? But how to decorate?

Let’s follow the thought process here:

Dan’s moving to Italy… He’s leaving on a jet plane ... He loved the movie “Snakes On A Plane”... And he spews catchphrases from “Anchorman” like bullets from Tony Montana’s “little fren.”

Got it.

7. THE CAKE THEY ORDER WHEN THEY KNOW YOU CAN’T COME

She probably would have wanted the corner piece.

6. THE I-CAN’T-BELIEVE-THEY-MADE-THAT CAKE

Is this the stuff women do at baby showers? Because this is all kinds of wrong.

Not because it’s a pre-partum cake. Mostly because the baby has been left alone in the tub. DON’T YOU PEOPLE KNOW HOW MANY BABIES DIE UNATTENDED IN ICING DROWNINGS EACH YEAR???

There. Better now.

5. LET’S GET THIS OVER WITH SO WE CAN GO BACK TO WORK CAKE

Baker’s inner monologue:

“Jesus, this is a pain in the #####. I can’t believe they asked me to do this. I have to make the kids’ lunches and do a load of laundry before I go to bed… I’ll show those sonsabitches…

“Wait. Better put a heart on it so they know I was kidding.”

4. HOMOPHONES ARE SO FUNNY, HA-HA CAKE

What is it with Amy cakes that no one can get the damn writing correct?

The people who get a laugh from this cake are the same ones who set the DVR to tape “America’s Funniest Videos” reruns every night on TBS.

Tom Bergeron… funny guy.

3. THE MOVING TO A PLACE WITH A FUNNY ACCENT CAKE

The lure is irresistable to mock the ultimate destination for the departing colleague by utilizing a cultural stereotype. The only regret is that this person wasn’t moving farther north to Anchorage because, you know, they had a kick-##### Playmobil igloo and eskimos they could have used.

2. THE “WE’RE NOT REALLY GOING TO EAT THAT, ARE WE?” CAKE

Goodbye, sweet colon. Parting through bowel resection is such sweet sorrow.

1. THE “UP YOURS” CAKE

The subtle/sometimes not-so-subtle subtext of most office cake ceremonies, hidden just below the icing, is the common thought of all those in the room: “I can’t believe Mike got out of here before we could.”

The best way to celebrate that frustration? By sharing a cake with icing applied so sloppily that it looks like a car bomb went off inside Willie Wonka’s head.

See you later, Mike. Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.



UPDATE: And in a completely unrelated matter, apparently some people enjoy eating cake with the boss’ face on it.