“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot” — Chapter 62

Apart from one occasion about a year and a half ago, he hasn’t worked any Saturdays. Following, to date, the only day he’s missed so far, he decided he needed to make up the hours, on account of some pressing work, rather than turn in a personal day. Therefore drove down here to South, just that one Saturday, which was admittedly a little more peaceful than the standard weekday, nearly alone up there in the offices. Still, he’s hoping this doesn’t turn into the new norm, giving up a Saturday for a Wednesday every time they have some event at one of the stores. Particularly as his presence should never be required.

The reason they want him here, and he knows this is something that starts with various disorganized department managers and merchandisers, reaching a fever pitch as it’s passed up to store managers who in turn ask Duane to make this happen, has to do with what Edgar thinks of as last minute freakouts. The day of the events, people are stumbling across new items that nobody ever sent him, which they’d planned as centerpieces for their Customer Appreciation or Holiday Tasting displays. Probably with a hot promotional price, too, which as a result was never entered. Not only that, but signs remaining up for sales that had in fact already expired.

This last point is one that seriously rankles him. This isn’t to say that he never forgot anything in the entire history of working here, but he still maintains that he is way more organized than probably anyone else at this place. You could count on one hand the times he forgot to deploy a file — and if it was his mistake, he would just log in remotely from home and fix it anyway. Another factor as to why this isn’t that common is that the daily new item files and the sales batches typically involve numerous different stores and departments, and if something’s wrong or missing, he would have almost always have heard about it from at least one person. More often than not, assuming someone didn’t just forget to send him an item, the leading cause of why it “isn’t working” is that a person who insisted upon typing something by hand, instead of copying and pasting, either omitted or miskeyed a single digit in the UPC — which has the same effect as not sending an item at all. It’s not going to scan.

But these sales signs remaining up past the point that the promotion has ended are a nuisance on many levels, a pet peeve in general. This is because the Orchestra program doesn’t have any sale sign function, so the employees are whipping these up themselves. And even though he has been in a habit of signing off every email related to this topic with the byline, so you’ll probably want to make a note of this, and put the ending date on your signs, almost nobody does this.

The reason they don’t wish to do so — unless considering possibly pure laziness — is that they are well aware that, knowing this place, the sale is going to eventually be extended anyway. It happens all the time. Instead of taking the signs down, they’d rather just leave them up and play dumb for a few days, until someone complains to Edgar that the sale “isn’t working.” This is rarely if ever a problem with the vitamins department, as Dale plans out their sales in advance, everyone is made well aware of the dates, which almost always run the same full month as their sales flyers. Otherwise, he’s running into this situation repeatedly, although it doesn’t happen nearly as much in bulk, produce, deli or alcohol, is really only an epidemic in grocery, and even then just certain notorious characters.

“Well it probably ended, right?” he usually says, in the middle of clicking through a few screens to reach that tab in Orchestra.

“I don’t know. It just isn’t working,” is the standard reply.

Even though this has an unbeaten track record of being 100% the cause for this scenario, that the sale has ended, and the most obvious answer from a common sense standpoint, not to mention — if he really wanted to be a dick about it — something they probably should have investigated themselves in the email chain first before calling him, these repeat offenders always act like that possibility never occurred to them, but they frankly consider it mighty far-fetched that this would be the culprit.

There’s never been a single documented case where this wasn’t the cause. One reason for this is that you can’t alter the sale batches, therefore they aren’t going to just stop working in the middle. You would have to actively go in and delete the entire thing, and start over, that’s the only way to change something. This hasn’t happened, and while theoretically he could have entered the wrong end date, to date this blessedly hasn’t happened, either. But in the wake of this find, what typically happens is that, after a three day pause, during which the signs were left up, customers were probably complaining and cashiers were forced to rebate the difference repeatedly, after someone got around to notifying Harry who finally got around to notifying Edgar — as he certainly isn’t going to make this call on his own — then the promotional price is reinstated, for another random series of weeks, which certainly nobody is going to create brand new signs for (why would they? They already have some up! Sweet!) or even hand-write the ending date on, and therefore this entire chain reaction is likely to repeat.

So while this is pitched as having him on hand so they can be more “organized” at tomorrow’s event, what it really means is the complete opposite. They are playing into the chaos, they are capitulating to the chaos. Encouraging the chaos, signing off on the chaos, because now you have someone here to hold your hands six days a week, as you tiptoe through this field of daisies! How awesome is that!?

Which brings them to the present tense. It isn’t that he expects to have a ton of legitimate work tomorrow, has already somewhat committed to doing the bare minimum, for a change, if they’re going to force him to hang out here for this event. There’s always various b.s. busywork type stuff to be done, which feels like screwing off and wasting time during a normal workday, but which technically needs handled at some point — deleting emails, clearing out the downloads folder, et cetera, and this is what he intends to preoccupy himself with, being on-call and waiting around in anticipation of the inevitable last minute freakouts. Or so he tells himself, anyway. In truth he will probably become bored with this somewhere around the time that he fully awakens, like around coffee cup #3, otherwise known as 10am, and will begin tackling something more substantial. For the second time now, for example, Tracy from Bellwether just met with him, and they spent two days going over every single bulk item, to see what kind of prices Rob might be willing to match, on items they’re ordering from elsewhere. He’s already gotten the vendor and item number switches entered, plans on rolling out those tags on Monday, but might take a look at the sales history and the margins to see if they need to change any retails, too. It makes sense to roll this up together, if at all possible.

“That’s pretty cool that you figured this out. Then again, you’re really good with computers, right?” Valerie says to him. As he kicks back at the conference room table, having connected an HDMI cord from his laptop to the mounted TV screen so that he can watch mindless junk on Hulu while he works.

Edgar busts out laughing, causing Valerie to giggle as well and ask him what’s so funny. “Nothing, it’s just that half the people working here would say that is my job. Um. No. I mean I guess it’s somewhat true, but that’s not my job. Good With Computers isn’t really anyone’s job, anywhere.”

“Really? Well, I mean, I know mostly you’re just dealing with numbers here, but…”

“Right. If you want to get technical, as far as payroll goes I’m in the accounting department. Definitely not the IT department. Like, OK, to stick with this analogy,” Edgar suddenly considers, and holds up the remote for this television, “I would be the guy who could tell you what every button does on here. Or better yet, the guy back at the home office actually entering the information that comes up on your remote. But I wouldn’t know the first thing about, like, climbing on someone’s roof and installing the cable service. Or repairing the satellite up in outer space.”

“That’s funny. Because every time the internet goes down around here…”

“Yes! Exactly! Someone’s running up here and bugging me about it first thing! But you probably know as much about it as I do…”

“That’s true. I probably do,” she admits, playing with her hair, having flopped into a chair at the end. She too is stuck working this weird atypical Saturday event, but with even less to do. “But don’t tell anyone.”

“Palmyra’s even worse,” he muses, on a roll now with this topic, “you can pretty much guarantee that every time you’re in that store, the internet’s gonna go down for awhile. Then they’re tracking me down. Hey man, think you can take a look at it? Usually like a total chump I’ll just go ahead and contact IT myself instead of telling them to do it. But sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better just to tell them, look, this isn’t my job, please leave me alone. Call the damn IT people yourself.”

“Oh yeah. I wonder about that all the time. Like that day with Harry and the gluten free list. I’m sitting there like, uh…..I’m literally too stupefied to even come up with a response for a couple of seconds there. All I can think is, how in God’s name did he ever get the idea that this is something I handle?”

“Yeah,” Edgar snickers, “tell me about it. And then all I could think was, well wait a second, if Harry’s under the impression that this is Valerie’s job, then what does he think that I do all day?”

“It’s a horrifying thought, isn’t it? I worry about that sometimes, like, thinking, please don’t let me ever become the befuddled old-timer who doesn’t understand what the fuck is going on. Please. Anything but that!”

“Oh yeah, totally. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s like this…vague fog, swirling around in their heads. If they had to describe your job, they would say you’re…Good With Computers.”

The most hilarious aspect of this conversation, perhaps, is that Harry is the one heading up their latest store opening. Or maybe that, going even a level higher, that the climate is so surreal around here that nobody even thinks it all that strange. Although it’s certainly telling that, clearly unimpressed by this operation himself, during what is generally presumed to have been his first and only visit, they haven’t seen John Amos in here ever again.

He’s actually a bit mystified as to what’s even going on with this store opening. Though aware that it’s located in the Arcadia section of town, on the eastern fringe of Chesboro, neither he nor most other employees have yet seen it. Harry, Duane, Corey, and Vince are all over there quite a bit, possibly one or two others, but that’s it. This despite Edgar asking Harry on a couple occasions thus far, “are you sure I’m not needed for anything over there?”

“Hmm mmm,” Harry has decisively assured him, with a steady shake of the salt n’ pepper hair helmet, “I’ll let you know when you’re needed.” He even goes as far as to explain his vision for how this will transpire, once he enlists Edgar’s help. “I’m gonna have you just go through the entire store, scanning everything — boom, boom, boom — and then I’ll have this whole team of people right behind you, hanging all the tags.”

So in the meantime there’s nothing to do but wait. The way Duane has explained it, the permits needed for a new store like this are beyond brain numbing. The city won’t approve permit A until they have received permit B, which is itself only issued upon being granted permit C. And even that minefield might be navigable, except for the fact that permit C is contingent upon a green light for A. So it’s weeks upon weeks of this glacial near standstill.

Edgar has done what he can around the fringes thus far. A handful of new items have trickled in for Arcadia, and he’s added these. Their accountant down in Orlando, Reece Leibovitz, discovered that although it’s considered part of Chesboro, the Arcadia shopping plaza actually sits about a block beyond the county line, which has opened up a whole other can of sugar free organic gummy worms. The extra 1% prepared foods tax doesn’t apply there, and as their Orchestra software has no functionality for charging a different tax rate for the same stuff, depending upon location — they’ve been in touch with the software’s creator, up in Canada, concerning that point — and considering that they’ve already begun construction of a smoothie/coffee bar for Arcadia, to serve precisely some of the items this tax would apply to, they’re forced to get creative yet again. It isn’t just a tax issue, it’s an EBT one as well, so now they’ve got this brand new sub-category, Grab & Go 2, with the middle tax rate, yet also not eligible for EBT. Requiring a whole slew of specially created PLU numbers, to be added to their scale which is not yet online, and entered of course into their Orchestra database as well, those these numbers are otherwise identical to the items already being sold at Southside and Palmyra.

Aside from this, while stuck in this holding pattern at Arcadia, there are just the standard daily grind type projects, though heightened as this is the holiday season. Though they’ve finally gotten Pat to knock it off with jacking up deli dishes every time his margin comes back soft, the Thanksgiving turkeys have been a mini-debacle. Considering that their merchandiser for some reason ordered reams of a totally normal supplier that half of the grocery chains in existence use — Smithson Farms — they’ve been forced to slash that retail in an attempt to keep up with their competitors. The only problem is, they don’t quite have the purchasing power of a Cost Merchant or a Harry Teet, therefore aren’t getting quite the same price breaks. Therefore are now in an awkward spot of making just four cents per pound on these turkeys, which is nowhere near a 35% margin, yet is still much higher than every other retailer selling Smithson as their Thanksgiving birds.

But he tries not to dwell upon that, particularly now. Holiday season or not, new store on the horizon or not, this will positively be the last weekend day that he grants them, at least for a while. Maybe he would make a point of drawing this line in the sand anyway, yet the reason is actually a practical one: he’ll soon be taking on a part-time job, nights and weekends, at this country club, a plum gig that Melanie has helped him land. Even so, he can sense a battle brewing just over that horizon — if not over this issue, then clashing with the bosses over something else. Sometimes you just know these things, you catch their scent before they even arrive.