Litnet

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I was done struggling to battle my way through the new AI environment.

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I leaned my bicycle against the backyard wall and clip-clopped my way into the kitchen for a coffee treat before I started my day – or, perhaps, before I started my new career. I had sent in an application to Takealot the night before to work as a local outsourced delivery driver for them in the Overberg. My translation work had well and truly dried up that month – and it was usually the month things turned for me, when the new financial year kicked in for the European companies. I was done struggling to battle my way through the new AI environment.

As the water heated noisily in the kettle on the gas stovetop, I scrolled through my emails, as I did every hour or so every day. And there it was – an email from Takealot. With a sigh, resigned to my fate and willing to return to a dull life of mundane work just to make ends meet, I opened the email to find out how to proceed. All I saw was this one word: Rejected. My eyes blurred, and I couldn’t even read further to see why.

For a moment, I was thrown off balance, a little stunned. Then the bizarreness – the absolute hilarity of the situation – hit me, and a slightly hysterical snort exploded from the depths of my lycra-clad stomach. I mean, there I was: I could speak four languages, I could translate 10 000 words a day in different language combinations, I had a degree, I had my own house and my own car, I had managed to conjure up a midlife career change at the age of 40 all by myself 15 years earlier – but Takealot didn’t think I was qualified to deliver parcels for them. It was too funny.

The kettle whistled through my laughter, and I realised that this might just be a defining moment in my life. I was going to have to get creative and reinvent myself – again. I tipped a spoonful of sugar into my coffee and absent-mindedly started stirring. Come on, Hermien, I thought to myself. Think! There must be something you’re good at, something you haven’t developed or exploited yet. Something you can turn into income. Take a moment and think of every single thing you can do well.

Well, I mused, I was good at eating. Another near-hysterical fit of laughter welled up in my throat, but then I stopped short as a sobering thought suddenly struck me. I would watch random things on YouTube, and a few weeks earlier the algorithm had sent me an interesting clip about one of the participants of My 600-lb life. This woman, who was in her late twenties or early thirties, had made a living livestreaming herself eating cake on OnlyFans.

Now, OnlyFans – as I discovered when I did the obligatory research a little later – was a site where you could stream anything, and people paid to watch it. In reality, it was actually a porn/stripper/fetish site. This woman’s YouTube clip was astonishing. You’d expect perfect make-up, filters, sexy clothing – but no: she had her hair up in a messy knot, no make-up, and simply proceeded to pull up her very ordinary T-shirt to place a smallish cake on her ample stomach. Then she spent a few minutes eating it with relish, slowly and delicately, her long painted nails the only grooming I could see. And she got paid for that. No stripping, no porn, no dirty talk, no funny noises. She just ate a cake and got money for it.

Gosh, I could eat cake. How difficult could that be? And with renewed hope and enthusiasm – by now not laughing any longer – I rushed to my PC to start doing some research straight away.

And then I followed the white rabbit and veered off the path just a little. I honestly only wanted to see how one would go about starting such a business, but before I knew it, I was reading an article about a stripper on OnlyFans who had a client one day request her to crush something. Yes, it was a thing. Crushing. But I won’t go into more detail on where that led. At first, she refused, but then she discovered that there was a relatively innocent way of satisfying this fetish. And, as a bonus, she could combine it with an even bigger fetish called WAM to maximise the results. WAM stood for “wet and messy”: there are people who get very excited when you pour a can of baked beans over yourself, or smear ice cream over your breasts – you get the idea. I guessed it was something like the kitchen scene from 9 ½ weeks. And this was how this artiste discovered cake sitting.

Sitting on cakes? Wow, I could do that! I wouldn’t even have to worry about picking up weight, since I wouldn’t be eating any of the cake! Surely, there had to be a market for older, overweight women sitting on cake? Even if it was the bottom end of the market, so to speak!

And, of course, my mind started running wild. What if I got a fan from Napier – and Napier was full of gays and lesbians, so it might even be one of my girlfriends! Gosh, what would I do? But I guessed if I knew someone who had a fetish for cake sitting, then that person probably wouldn’t want it to be known, so I should be safe. And there was a story in this! Die koeksitter van Napier. No, that wouldn’t do – people would misread it and think it was Die koeksister van Napier. No, lovey, it’s not quite the same thing.

But, yes, this could be a story. How would I turn this into a crime novel? Maybe the koeksitter discovers a human trafficking ring and helps to bring them down. Trafficking in koeksitters? No, I didn’t think that would work. But I had something there; I just needed to put more thought into it. As I browsed further, I discovered that this career wasn’t without its hazards. It was messy! You’d have to have a dedicated space, laid out with plastic. And you didn’t have to be naked when you sat on your cake, but at the very least, you should have pretty underwear. And the icing was a health hazard, too – if you did this regularly, there was a risk of thrush. It was fascinating.

By the time I went to bed that evening, I knew quite a lot about cake sitting. I felt ready to go to the OK the next day and do a practice run with one of their cakes. From my research, I knew it shouldn’t be chocolate or red velvet, but the OK usually has those vanilla sponge cakes that are quite cheap. I could afford a little in-house training. I would just have to remember to remove the cherries. I drifted off to sleep thinking that Takealot might actually have done me a huge favour by rejecting my application. This could be the start of a whole new era in my life.

The next morning, dressed and ready to hop down to the OK, I checked my emails while I had my coffee, as I did every morning – and there it was: a translation job offer for 1 500 pounds. Bummer.

See also:

KI en die vryskutwoordsmid: ’n fundamentele verskuiwing in strategie en rigting

Lost in translation?

An investigation on the use of translation methods by Afrikaans language acquisition students