“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot” — Chapter 40

As they begin moving into the Walnut location, it makes perfect sense to roll this into a company-wide rearrangement. Palmyra’s produce manager, Johnny, has requested a transfer to work in Walnut, as he lives nearer there, and some laidback, seemingly rational and middle aged mom type, Charlene, is hired to fill his former post. Meanwhile, a basically sweet but grouchiness-projecting older in woman in vitamins, Alice, though grousing daily for years about her hour long drive to Palmyra, is offered a position at Walnut — like Johnny, it’s much nearer to her home — but she declines this assignment.

Brady, who has a little money saved and wants to travel the country, possibly live with his brother out west for a while, puts in his notice. So the search for an assistant manager is on. This creates an opening, however, for what is possibly Duane’s most masterful move yet, a potential solution to this Pierre O’Brien quandary.

Pierre continues to rub just about everyone in the building the wrong way, compounded in that it’s generally perceived that he’s not exactly hitting it out of the park with his job anyway. Edgar continues to glimpse one aspect of this first hand, even now that Pierre’s been granted overlord status with much of the scheduling, in that the would-be Frenchman hasn’t let up any on his wine ordering madness.

His face visibly dropped to the floor the first time Edgar related Harry’s latest edict, as Pierre shuffled into the office clutching a newly arrived bottle in each hand. “Harry said I’m not allowed to add any new wines to the system,” Edgar explains, as Pierre halts in this tracks as well, halfway across the room.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, seriously, that’s what he said. I’m not allowed to add these.”

“I see,” Pierre replied, with an almost movie villain edge to his voice, a determined glint to the eye.

So what happens next is perhaps quite predictable, here in the land of unintended consequences. Pierre doesn’t stop ordering in the truckloads of wine — instead, he begins using an old-fashioned sticker gun to slap prices on the bottles, and moves them directly to the shelf. When people complain about this enough, Edgar included, then Pierre simply stops doing even this, and just plays dumb, as though he isn’t aware that there are a ton of new varietals on the shelf which don’t scan at the register.

Well, it’s common knowledge that he doesn’t drive, takes a bus here each morning instead. Yet, as he lives downtown and it’s basically just a quick shot down Southside Blvd, this isn’t a problem. Duane’s brilliant solution to the Palmyra assistant manager opening, however, is to ship Pierre up there, explaining that he is very badly needed at that location and is the only person they have who can possibly handle that job.

Guffaws echo like gunfire throughout the company. Everyone pretty much knows the intent behind this, even if Duane would never admit as much, maybe legally could not ever admit as much. Pierre now has to catch a bus at five o’clock in the morning just to make an opening shift up there. They are hoping he will soon become fed up enough with that arrangement to quit. And yet, with perfect predictability, Pierre’s take on this situation is considerably different.

“Duane told me that they could not seem to straighten out this store,” Pierre explains to Edgar, the first Monday afternoon that he swings by there, after the change, “he said they needed me to come up here and save it.”

“Really…”

“Oh yeah. That’s what he said, mmm hmm.”

Well, if nothing else, Edgar’s thankful for one thing, in that he can now at least hand off his Monday afternoon wine tags to Pierre, instead of hunting down this crap himself. Pierre is thrilled at the prospect of having new wine prices to hang — whether increases or decreases, it doesn’t matter — because in some roundabout way, it confirms for him the importance of this category. The more the merrier, then, and admittedly, he knows exactly where all of this stuff is, which is better than Edgar fumbling around trying to find it. Now all he has to concern himself with is the beer half of the equation, which is a little less confusing anyway.

Regarding this store needing straightened out, there’s definitely some truth to that, even if it’s laughable that Pierre is the person for this task. The deli in particular remains a black hole swallowing up the bodies, even if Edgar’s mom has been able to bring in a consistent, though less than expected, profit. One unexpected area of concern the guy brought in from the culinary institute, Chef Joshua.

Modern television’s obsession with food shows is to blame for much of this, in that it’s convinced these chefs (or “chefs,” as is often the case) that they are rock stars. On top of that, the ones coming from a restaurant background seem to have some troublesome behavioral problems, while those fresh out of school believe that business and profit related concerns are beneath them. All they have to worry about is cranking out beautiful creations. This phenomenon rears its head one day when Edgar’s mom is going over paperwork and realizes that Joshua’s using $38 worth of the most expensive mushrooms they have over in produce, per $5 cup of soup — and this says nothing of the other ingredients involved.

“It tastes amazing, though, doesn’t it? Am I right? Taste it,” Joshua says, when she presents these findings to him.

“That’s not the point. We’re losing our ass on this soup. We can’t be making this.”

“But isn’t it amazing?”

Try as she might, Edgar’s mom can’t seem to drive this point home. Although she does eventually earn a small victory of sorts when he at least stops writing down these transfers — oh, he’s still grabbing the high end mushrooms for his insanely underwater-priced soup, and a litany of other similar moves. He’s just not committing them to paper any longer. Which might make the deli’s numbers look a little better, but it’s having the exact same effect on the store.

Well, they can’t exactly fire a guy with this skill set, especially as the customers are raving about his food. But it comes as something of a relief when, after a handful of months, he either becomes bored or finds better prospects elsewhere, and moves on. Edgar’s mom happens to know a readymade replacement from a previous job, Chef Mike, and he is immediately brought aboard. This problem is easily solved, although you could stack every troublesome situation in the building and this pile still wouldn’t quite reach Jimmy Ray status.

“Corey can’t stand Jimmy Ray,” Edgar’s mom says to him one evening, kicking back at his parents’ house after work, “he doesn’t like Zaire, and he can’t stand Jimmy Ray. But his hands are basically tied, there’s nothing he can do about it.”

Although Edgar chuckles and tells her “just wait” when she says that Pierre seems like a really nice guy, he would agree that even at Pierre’s worst, that dude only amounts to a major aggravation, a skin irritation that won’t quite go away. And the same could be said of Zaire. It isn’t just that she’s kind of obnoxious on the job, but she talks nonstop as well and much of what she’s saying strains against the very edge of credulity.

But at least the store manager presumably has their back in this regard. One day a handful of employees are walking a few paces behind her, Corey included. Corey begins imitating her walk, by kneeling slightly, draping his arms out about 45 degrees from his body, and waddling, as he smirks over at the rest of them. Everyone in his midst chokes down a laugh, because this is really the outlet available to them. By necessity they’ve turned her into a joke, because you can’t really argue with her too much, or she’ll complain to HR. And yet it’s hard to develop much, or any, sympathy, as it feels like mostly her doing. She’s a short, rather large black woman in possession of — there’s no way to sugarcoat this — quite the caboose indeed, yet professes to go jogging just about every morning, says she has been for years. Back in November, she also claimed to go out and hunt for her own turkey every Thanksgiving morning, as some longstanding tradition with her dad. Corey is present for this heartwarming monologue also, and rolls his eyes at everybody else in the room. After Zaire leaves, Edgar’s mom cracks up those who remain by conjuring up the image of their vitamin manager out there in the marsh, with a shotgun and a whistle, wearing a puffy hunting jacket and one of those big, floppy, Elmer Fudd type hats.

But there’s aggravation, or a nuisance so extreme it’s become funny…and then there’s flat out psychotic behavior. Into this category they can maybe lump former deli stalwart Ashley, with her lawsuit against the company. As her dad is a lawyer and the back and forth stretches on for months, they eventually agree to settle out of court with her, in a quaint little meeting room somewhere, with Duane, Corey, Ashley and the legal representatives for each side present. Meaning that as a result of that most traumatic day whereby she was found sitting in the breakroom on the clock, screamed a bunch of profanities and then walked off the job, she is awarded $5000 in damages.

“I think she has a pattern of doing this, wherever she goes,” Corey says of the verdict, “that was like a professional hit.”

Regarding current employees, however, Jimmy Ray alone tips the scales in this direction. Even if, like a true sociopath, he is often crafty enough to tiptoe around anything ever being proven, or pinned upon him. With threats both stated and implied, he’s gotten the deli personnel thinking twice about stepping foot across the imaginary line into his precious meat shop — although they likely would have done their best to avoid him anyhow. The only exception really is Edgar’s mom, who has no choice but to interact with him, considering that these numbers are also her responsibility.

Jimmy Ray’s also somewhat limited in how much crafty tiptoeing he can when it comes to the numbers. He believes he has found an extremely clever means for improving meat’s bottom line when he begins surreptitiously moving all his outdates over to the deli’s cooler, and then adding these to the transfer sheet. This is after all a common practice — but only when the deli actually requests the product. Endlessly dumping every single dated package is only going to work for a couple of weeks, tops, and this is exactly what happens.

Even though he is seething and issuing more threats to Edgar’s mom, when she confronts him on this issue, he has no choice but to adopt a smiley face otherwise and comply. Or so it would seem. His next stunt is to only transfer the product that deli requests, but to write down some crazed, hyper-inflated numbers for the transaction itself, as if no one is ever going to check the math.

Edgar is actually the one catching this, come inventory time, and he’s helping these stores as always put their numbers together. Although it’s true they have some creative practices around here in general — like Duane telling Corey, “you need to find twenty thousand dollars,” or the way they will shore up lean months by ordering in a huge shipment of something like honey, and count it, but not turn in the paperwork until after inventory — it’s an altogether different story when your president is signing off on something. Versus a combative meat cutter who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and promising misfortune to anyone who disagrees with him.

He dashes off an email to Jimmy Ray about these numbers, along with his corrections. Expecting that John Wayne Jeffrey Manson Calhoun here will probably be dialing his number at some point this afternoon, which is totally fine. This is something else about the email dynamic that he thinks maybe guys like Harry don’t get: okay, if you’re sitting in an office, even if you suspect a phone call is in order, chances are it makes more sense for you to send an email. Don’t pull people off the floor at the stores to answer the phone every time a thought pops into your head. If a phone call is needed, they can ring you when they are free.

Anyway, as if on cue, Jimmy Ray dials his extension shortly after three. It isn’t just the deli transfers, either, but the known loss numbers that are majorly suspect, as in consistently pulled out of thin air. Well, give the guy credit for this creativity and bravado, maybe — for example, while you want the stuff you’re throwing away to be as minimal as possible, obviously, it’s always beneficial to document as much of this as possible. Thus the inflated totals here as well. Of course, this wasn’t really a debate, because Edgar had already explained what he was changing this figure and the transfer one to. Not that this prevents Jimmy Ray from advancing his own off-kilter point.

“Meat’s at an 80 percent margin,” he states.

“What? 80 percent? No,” Edgar replies, “we’re shooting for a 25 in meat.”

Jimmy Ray chuckles, and if you had to attach a loose label to the sentiment behind it, Edgar would ballpark it as the sound of someone who didn’t expect to be challenged on something, yet thinks it amusing anyway, because he is just going to come up with another angle to thwart you, therefore what you are doing is a total waste of time. “Well, yeah, that’s true, that’s true. But I’m really aiming for around an 80 percent,” he says.

“Heh. Okay. Well, whatever the case, that’s beside the point, because this stuff is supposed to be transferred at cost.”

And he knows this, of course, as even the nonsensical “eighty percent margin” excuse was just a smokescreen. But he’s never going to admit as much, only continue with this sociopathic tapdance routine.

“You got it, old man,” Jimmy Ray says, chuckling again before he hangs up, “whatever you say.”

Which is a strange line, maybe, and more of a passive-aggressive stunt, considering Edgar’s all of 34 to Jimmy Ray’s 26 or 27 or whatever it is. But the whole point of that comment, the tone behind it, is another implied taunt: that’s fine, bookkeeper guy, keep messing with me and see how this works out for you.