“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot” — Chapter 121

The yearly reviews arrive next. And while token raises which may or may not keep pace with inflation are great and all, they almost more look forward to these as a chance to get some shit out into the open. In this respect, the reviews have almost come full circle back again to their actual intended purpose. Almost. At least as far as Edgar is concerned. Because while the token raises might be just about meaningless, so would be Todd’s impression of what, in his infinite wisdom, he believes Edgar is or isn’t doing correctly under this nonexistent, not the least bit accurate banner of “techie guy.” However, Edgar is eager to hear it, to give him fuel for launching into his own diatribes.

And indeed, this latest review proves about as surreal as expected. At least when the likes of Duane and Reece were writing his in the past, even if you didn’t maybe agree with the exact number scores they were assigning you — because realistically, that was never going to happen, nor should it — on a scale of 0 to 3, there was the sense that they were nonetheless all existing simultaneously in the same universe, they were speaking the same language in the same reality. This much they could agree upon, and therefore could proceed to discuss some things from there. Or even his first year under Todd, a year ago, with the new president only on the job for a couple of months. That one had been anonymously bland, a concession to the fact that he was new here and would clearly have to make some stuff up, due to his unfamiliarity with everyone. Which was fine, understandable even, as both sides had an unspoken understanding that this was the case.

Now, however, it’s more accurately turned into: what the hell are you guys even talking about? Are we sure we are discussing and working for the same company? These are the thoughts running through his head, as he’s seated in one of the plush, roomy, brand new leather chairs in Todd’s office, and Fred in another beside him. With the big man himself across the spacious, also quite massive and not even a year old desk. Edgar’s flipping through these handful of pages, and is stunned to discover just about every mark ranges from middling to poor. Even this might be understandable, as part as some wacky motivational stunt, or the gruff worldview many management figures espouse, the fact that yeah, well, I don’t give out threes. There’s always room for improvement. Except that the comments themselves, whether written down here or spoken aloud now, prove that these guys are out to lunch, they have no idea what’s even going on around this place.

Edgar takes too much on and as a result falls behind on his responsibilities.

“Okay, wait — what is this all about? I’m not behind on anything. As far as I ever knew, I’m always caught up on what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Mmm…you need to delegate more,” Todd announces, kicking back in his own gigantic leather chair, hands across his belly.

“Delegate what, though, exactly? And to who? I mean…,” he chuckles slightly, because this should be a fairly obvious point, one which he emphasizes by turning both palms upward and shaking them back and forth, a universal sign that roughly translates as, look, there’s nothing here. “I don’t have any employees underneath me or a department or anything like that.”

“Mmm…show Sharon how to do some things.”

“Yeah, show Sharon how to do some of your job,” Fred seconds, “because like she’s complaining to us, he’s not even showing me how to do anything! I just told her, okay, I’ll talk to him about that.”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to be teaching her my job. This is the first I’m hearing about this. I mean…she’s the receiver at one of the stores. I’m the pricing coordinator. You see what I’m saying? These aren’t even the same, uh…”

“Well, just teach her some things. That way you can take some of this off of your plate, and you’re not falling behind,” Fred reiterates.

This entire angle is slowly bringing his blood to a simmer, but he’s not sure how many times he can continue to stress I’m not actually behind on anything, though. What is it you think I’m not doing? Not when it’s already established that they have no answers for this. The other part about this is, to continue down this road is going to sour his opinion of Sharon. He’s known for a long time that she is power hungry and will throw herself into any conversation anyone gives her a chance to elbow her way into. But they do have a solid working relationship otherwise, and he would prefer to just think about what a great job she does and tune out everything else. Because this is pure bullshit, if she is in fact complaining to them, like he’s doing something wrong by not turning over some of his job to her.

“Okay, but the other part of this is, people are constantly coming to me with things that aren’t even my job. Like the internet, or the printers, or even that PLU machine we had over there at Central. If I’m around, then I’m usually the first person they’re bugging with this crap. It’s like, I don’t mind helping, but at the same time, if it’s being held against me that this stuff isn’t working…”

“Well that’s what we’re saying, you know, if you delegate some of this other stuff, then you’d have more time to focus on…”

Edgar shakes his head to cut Fred off and reiterates, “but that’s not even my job. I’m not the equipment repairman around this place. I mean, you look at the door to my office, what does it say? PRICING. Pricing. I’m not in IT. Or even, take something basic like running movement reports. Okay, probably about half the people don’t have a problem running movement reports, they’re totally fine with it. The other half are bugging me all the time to run movement reports. But anyone whatsoever can run a movement report. Anyone. It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

He doesn’t get into details here, but is thinking about the most recent altercation stemming from this concept. It was maybe a month ago, in the waning days of Slingshot, and he’d been over at Arcadia working on something. Was sitting in the break area on his laptop, most likely assembling the new items file, late in the afternoon. Suddenly the vitamin rep Nicole, who’d formerly been vitamins manager up in Palmyra, comes drifting into his midst.

“Hey! Sondra said you’d be over here,” Nicole observes, walking up to him.

“Sondra?” he questions, looking up from his laptop.

“Yeah, I was asking her about a movement report for Central, but she told me to come over here and talk to you.”

“What!? Are you kidding me? She could have run you a movement report. Anyone can. I can’t believe she sent you all the way over here for that,” Edgar tells Nicole.

“Really?” Nicole says, her smile melting into an unsure frown.

Aside from the fact that Nicole herself was a vitamins manager for a solid year of this Slingshot program and should have already know this herself — but somehow apparently did not, however improbably, seems in fact surprised to learn such — it’s beyond ridiculous that after two years with this program, a person running a department wouldn’t know how to do so. Beyond this, though, he knows that Sondra has some sort of chip on her shoulder, a beef with Edgar personally. He’s aware that in her mind, despite a handful of dust-ups on this topic already, she refuses to learn something she considers to be “his job,” particularly as in her mind she is the busy one in this equation, when all he does is “sit around” all day.

Be that as it may, as noted before, you would think those above her would insist upon her knowing how to run some movement reports, from Todd on down to Destiny. That all of the people working under them would possess this knowledge. This is after all the whole point of those reports existing in the first place — not a weapon to brandish proving who is or isn’t busy or being a dickhead or whatever, but so you might actually, you know, be aware of how your products are performing. But of course, Sondra would surely insist she already knows that, without the reports.

He’s not getting any support from management, though. It’s kind of like that entire situation where she insisted — and continues to do so, in fact, despite reams of evidence to the contrary — that Slingshot orders are “constantly” failing to go through. Following that meeting in February where she slammed her pen down and said she was going to email him and Fred every time an order failed, three and a half months went by before he heard from her again, concerning this topic. Not that this prevented her from repeating all the same old arguments over again, sent to both him and Fred. As far as he’s concerned, his response is about as measured as it gets:

Sondra: Okay, thanks for letting me know about this order. If the orders are “constantly” failing as you say, though, then which ones are they? At that meeting in February you insisted that 20% of your orders weren’t going through, and said you would let us know every time this happened. But this is the first I’ve heard about it since then.

I will look into this order you mentioned, and get back to you on it. But if you have any other examples, just let me know. I do have a hard time believing they are failing as often as you claim, because it seems like this would affect every department at every store, not just your department. It’s hard to say for certain, though, without any specifics. Thanks.

Again, he said nothing whatsoever to attack her personally, when he would have been well within his rights, for example, to mention that the vast majority of the occasions she has made this claim in the past, it turned out the order was still open. Was neither making any bold claims about the Slingshot program or for that matter his own work — even though this particular aspect is on autopilot, doesn’t require much if anything from him once it’s set up — is infallible. None of which prevents her from flying off the handle with her own decidedly off-kilter response.

Why are you so defensive all the time!! I’m just trying to let you guys know that these orders aren’t working! Yes, they are constantly failing! Yes!

Off the mark or not, though, the problem with this response is that it also has given him none of the requested information. After additional prompting, meanwhile, she comes up with four more examples. One of which he can find no record of, that the order she’s mentioned even exists. The other three are…still open. As for the original order she cited, it does turn out that this particular one failed to connect with its destination. After researching the topic with Felix and the IT person on that end, however, they eventually conclude it was a problem at the receiving end of this order’s journey, i.e. not a Slingshot failing. Not that it matters, really. Even if it were a Slingshot failing, he feels like at most all Sondra has proven here is that this meant one order had failed to go through in the past half year. All things considered, that’s a rousing success.

He feels like he is never attacking anyone around this place, and never has. Nobody cares if you make mistakes. After all, one of the lines in his very own Copy And Paste Email Cliches file, which he uses fairly often, is hmm, I must have screwed something up. Let me look into that. The issue is when you flat out state you’re not even going to attempt doing something, or learn anything new. Yet nothing happens when these people take that stance. Or even when they fly off the handle and come after someone, even when they do make it personal. It doesn’t help that, despite asking to be copied on this kind of message, Fred has absolutely nothing to say on this topic, for the entire process. Probably because he doesn’t really understand what’s going on. Or it could be that, owing to his over 700 unread emails that he’s always “boasting” about, he didn’t even see them.

Management was actually so indifferent to this proposal that Edgar, Sharon, and Tosha came up with a few months back, about putting together binders of typed up instructions on how to do everything, that the three of them started doing so on their own anyway. Though only about halfway completed, they continue to add to this file whenever something pressing crops up, and continually send out what they have if it’s already in there. This was an effort to not just eliminate the so-called “urban legend” training method, which has prevailed for years, but also getting rid of the excuses, period, for people not wanting to learn something so simple as running a report. Or access and print off bulk labels from the shared drive, or anything else equally basic.

“I’ve even offered to show certain people how to run movement reports,” Edgar says, in the here and now, at this quote unquote performance review. Here is thinking not of Sondra, but of Walter over there at Arcadia, who continues scribbling those miserable pink letters on his shelf tags. “It’s, eh, mmm, that’s okay,” he continues, demonstrating by throwing his hands up. “But anyone who has access to RU Data can run reports. And shouldn’t they know how? It was the same way in Slingshot, too.”

“Okay, forget about Slingshot,” Todd replies, which seems about the most ridiculous and meaningless word someone could extract from the past three paragraphs Edgar has spoken. Instead, he’s choosing this point to harp upon, waving his own hands as he exchanges some sort of weird meaningful glance with Fred. “We’re not going back to Slingshot.”

Edgar shrugs and shoots them an expression meant to convey, umm…okay…what the fuck is your point?, back and forth, as he says, “I should hope not, I mean…that’s actually a really depressing thought. To put this much work into RU Data, just to go back to Slingshot.”

“Yeah, so…we’re not going back to Slingshot. Forget about Slingshot. Slingshot’s dead,” Todd reiterates, as he and Fred share another meaningful glance.

Well, that was certainly weird, though no weirder than the average conversation around this place these days. As he signs this middling review — which would be highly insulting if he dedicated any more thought to it — he’s thinking that if they absorbed just one sentence out of everything he said, he would consider this a major victory. You have to rally around what you can in times like these.