“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot” — B1

The job sounds straightforward enough. They are a tiny chain of three retail outlets, specializing in natural and locally sourced products, for health minded individuals. Though Bellwether Snacks owns them, these stores have relatively complete autonomy, so long as they are profitable. Healthy Hippie Market doesn’t really have its own accounting department, and nobody inside the stores in this role whatsoever, but Edgar Lodge will be the closest thing to it.

It’s a position that hasn’t existed before. Edgar’s primary focus will involve going through every invoice, ensuring each item is charged to the correct department. Then to charge the correct retails on the products, based upon that department’s margin. He must also collect the correct tax rates on everything, and place these products in the correct departments for tax and EBT eligibility reasons, based upon some truly mind-numbing finer points of this fair state’s tax code. Still, it all sounds somewhat basic, just a lot of concentration upon tiny details and a baseline of standard math/accounting type knowledge.

He had turned in his application at the Palmyra store nearly a month earlier, during which time they’d seemed extremely excited and assured him they would call back right away; it was only this outrageous enthusiasm which prompted him to check in again on two separate occasions, because…