The Bakery Under a Bridge
'Give. Google. Back.'
Earlier in 2025, still unemployed, when all the money I had meticulously saved vanished without a trace, slipping out like a proper Irish Goodbye (which, in Russia, we confusingly call an English goodbye), Masha, who had been covering most of the bills, started giving me a look.
The kind of look that says, “This is not what I signed up for.”
When we met, I often took her to parties and restaurants, driving around London in a car. But now, a year and several tens of thousands of pounds later, she found herself dating someone with no visa, no money, and no job prospects except an occasional funny essay online.
“I don’t care what you do,” she kept telling me. “Just pay the rent.”
So I started looking for options.
Job search in London is famously confidence-killing. You begin with high hopes about yourself. I sure did, assuming that after all my years of working for my dad and freelancing for his oligarch friends, I had a real career trajectory.
You apply for jobs and demand a salary higher than your previous one, telling yourself and the dozen interviewers a story they want to hear. But with every rejection, or worse, silence, a part of you dies. Like a character resurrected by blood magic in Game of Thrones, you come back to life after each failed application a little less yourself.
In February, a sign went up near our apartment, underneath a railway bridge. Two words: BRIDGE BAKERY. The area where we live is famous for lacking decent dining establishments. In the cut-your-wrists gloom of February in London, it felt like the promise of something light and warm and possibly sweet and buttery. A life where yours truly could pay full rent, keep his car, and not rely on credit cards to ride the bus.
As a college dropout and someone who never succeeded following the Traditional Path, I learned to be resourceful. And I instinctively felt that this arch bakery arrival wasn’t for nothing. It was a sign.
Maybe, I kept thinking, it’s part of a larger organisation. I’ve long wondered if I could create content for a non-financial company. Perhaps if I got their attention, I could pitch myself to their upper management. A chain of bakeries could be a start. Before you know it, I thought, I’d be managing dozens of accounts for top London restaurants. Who knows, maybe I could start an agency focused on food. Maybe after all these years, that was my real calling. The dots would finally connect, just like Steve Jobs promised in his Stanford commencement speech in 2005…
…I’d call the agency something sharp and funky. It would be a ONE WORD agency. Maybe that’s the name. One Word LLC. I could hire my ex-colleagues, get testimonials from ex-bosses, and make an ad.
A memorable, scroll-stopping ad. A funny ad.
What’s funny? Rabbits? Ryan Reynolds? I’ll ask ChatGPT.
ALRIGHT WAIT.
First things first, I told myself, stopping before I fell into another mental rabbit hole. (Actually, Rabbit Hole would be a good name for a content agency. Please stop it.)
The question is, I asked myself, swerving in my chair while Masha took a work call in the living room:
How can I get the attention of this soon-to-open bakery under a bridge?
Masha’s voice drifted from behind closed doors. “Can someone please make me a presenter?” Followed by a female British voice that should have belonged to a radio host but somehow ended up in a Teams meeting of a multinational consulting company.
A lightbulb went off in my mind. Presenter. I should present the soon-to-open bakery with a vision for its content. I would show them the Serge Magic.
I rubbed my hands together in that comically evil way movie villains do and swirled in my chair again.
Outside, it began to rain.
I got to work.
Two weeks later, Masha and I were in Southampton for our anniversary. Using some of the last money I had, I booked us an expensive hotel on the docks with a view of the yachts. We went on a private Titanic tour and explored the city’s pubs. We had oysters for dinner and a bottle of champagne delivered to the room. I bought a Polaroid camera for the occasion and asked Masha to take a photo of me stuffing myself with marine goo.
“To victory,” I said, raising my glass.
“What victory?”
“I finally have a plan for my job search,” I explained. “And if everything goes according to plan…”
Just then, my phone rang.
I wiped my hands of the marine goo and raised my index finger to Masha.
One second, darling.
“Yes?”
Some shuffling, and a child was screaming in the background.
Then an accent: “Hello? Is this Serge?”
“Yes.”
“Give. Google. Back.”
“Sorry?”
“I said, give our Google account back.”
“Who are you?”
“I am the one you stole our Google account from by creating a pin on the map where the bakery is supposed to be. You responded to comments on our behalf. This is theft.”
I went silent for a few seconds. “Well, you see, I’m a content creator and writer. I can—”
“I don’t care. Give. Google. Back. And Instagram. And LinkedIn. And…”
She spent some time listing the social media accounts I had created for the bakery under the bridge.
“Can I just say one thing?” I asked, panicking.
“No.”
Then she hung up.
I could almost hear the world’s smallest violin playing in the distance.
Across the table, Masha stared at me with a look that said, Well, what was that about?
I told her the whole story. My reasoning. How I had spent the past week responding to comments on the bakery’s Google Maps profile, creating a website, a logo, and a dozen other things with the intention of getting hired. I told her about the agency idea.
She listened quietly, smiling now and then, laughing, eating. When I finished, she put her fork down, washed the food with a sip of champagne, and said, “Why don’t you just make a resume and apply for jobs? You know, like a normal person?”
I looked at her, then out the window at the yachts. “That’s an interesting strategy.”
She nodded.
“That’s interesting,” I said again. “I don’t think I’ve ever really considered it.”
I raised my glass again. “To normal,” I said.
Masha clinked her glass to mine.
“To finally paying rent,” she said.
A few days later, I visited the bakery under the bridge. It turned out they served delicious bread, and since it was so close to our apartment, it felt like a tiny gift in the February gloom. As I stood in the queue, I felt a strong urge to ask the cashier for something free — you know, for setting up all their social media accounts and spending several days untangling the permissions. But as I watched the man roll up his sleeves and slice the olive sourdough, I decided against it. Not because I had changed. But because I didn’t need free bread.
What I needed was a job.
This reads like Kitchen Confidential Anthony Bourdain and I love it.
Always wonderfully complicated but as entertaining as ever Serge . You and Masha are perfectly balanced :)