You asked for the exact recipe—here’s the exact disaster.

Dana, the Portland boutique-bakery manager who “never actually baked anything herself but got promoted because she’s good at…”, asked for slavish obedience to the recipe. The staff obliged. The customers filed a small claimant’s court against texture.

They followed measurements, times and temperatures with the religious devotion usually reserved for speedrun inputs. Result: cookies that could double as tactical armor. One taste-and-structural-integrity test later, a regular described them as “regret with a crunch” (paraphrase). Laughably precise compliance turned pastry into an engineering problem.

Inventory: 1 manager confident in process, 12 exact-recipe cookies, 0 accountability. The Reddit comments did the postmortem for us—“That’s how a business loses dough,” someone quipped, and another helpfully observed that when bad behavior has no consequences it repeats. If you’re job-hunting while your boss adjudicates biscuits, tell the owner why you’re leaving; it’s the only way the bakery might avoid turning profit into puns.

Mic-drop: when leadership treats baking like a protocol and not a science, you get the exact result they asked for—precisely inedible. Sometimes the correct output is the only memo they’ll accept.