calm refuge in the eye of a storm
The so-called multitasking revolution is a now debunked concept, but if you ask Glenda, the flaws with that approach should have been obvious to anybody. That foolishness kind of reminded her of the cold-shower-in-the-morning trend. Or the bullet journaling trend. Or the Eisenhower box trend — so-called productivity and/or life hacks you saw in 1,000 articles for about six months but then no one ever mentioned again. Granted multitasking had a longer shelf life than most, but thank God that scourge is mostly eradicated. Although it does still have its adherents, true. But really, so long as this open office trend doesn’t take root up here in the Bellwether HQ, she’s cool.
Regarding multitasking, one flaw is that it has always seemed to her that if you just plowed through whatever job you had at hand, you were a lot less likely to forget something. Concepts like time spent and the finer points of productivity were maybe hard to quantify without a stopwatch, but yeah, anybody could have picked this apart for that reason alone. Somewhat related to this, Glenda also likes to have a how-to list of steps, even with tasks she could perform on autopilot. It’s truly amazing, really, how you could do the same things every day for three years, but then one of them out of the blue, you’d totally blank out on something. You have a Word document set up with every step outlined, though, and you can Alt-Tab all day back and forth, never drop the ball on anything.
It also tends to keep the mind from wandering as much, which, Lord, is that ever a challenge. Fortunately there remains enough mayhem jumping out from the pages — whether actual physical ones, or those of the email variety — that her attention is forcibly snapped in that direction, on a regular basis. An “invoice” arriving from Arcadia one week, for example, which is literally just a half sheet of yellow legal paper, freshly ripped from its pad, with a single item on it written in pencil, some random brand-new vendor’s name and address just below. Candace stamped and signed the thing, though, so Glenda logged it. Ditto a parking ticket from Long Beach, CA that someone paid out of the store checkbook at Palmyra.
Despite continued efforts, the number of checks written at the store level continually increases, following each brief burst where Reece puts her foot down and tells them to knock it off. Glenda is then instructed to send out a revised list of the few approved exceptions once again, which are really just three vendors by now, longstanding ones requiring COD. It makes for nice wallpaper, anyway. Because the initial sharp reduction steadily increases to the point where, yes, someone’s attempting to get away with having the store underwrite his personal parking ticket. For seven dollars!
Eventually you do just have to shrug and say whatever to oneself, if certain employees are dead set upon continuing down certain roads. If you’ve attempted on countless occasions to get them straightened out, and they are only screwing themselves by not doing so, then yes, whatthefuckever. It’s kind of like with these monthly expense reports she continues to receive, from certain key individuals. Though instructed by Rob to keep her eyes open for and flag anything suspicious, it’s laughable to even think about something that might qualify. The store managers all have brand new iPhones, for example, for which the company pays their monthly charges.
Must be nice. The funny thing about this, though, is that half of those people want to play the whole technophobe card if you suggest they need to keep up with their emails, or anything else along those lines. Come on, now. You’re not Amish. You have the latest edition of the most popular electronic gadget in the world, in your pocket, and you use it constantly. Meanwhile the rest of us make due with generations old devices, upon which, it’s often implied if not openly declared, management might consider it a real good idea to check and respond to emails from, even when we’re not on the clock.
Now that the stores have switched from Orchestra to this new Slingshot system, things have only gotten all the more interesting/chaotic. Edgar’s correct in stating that there always seems to be an unbelievable amount of mayhem for just a few stores. In her experience, though, this is how it goes with smaller operations. It’s just all the more frustrating here, she thinks, in that you’re rubbing shoulders with a parallel universe, so to speak, for the parent company itself is a very professional operation with all these extremely efficient processes ironed out, as a proper, well-run business should. Yet they tolerate such baffling behavior from Beatrice Locke’s old pet project, The Little Hippie That Could (Or Perhaps Not), even though she hasn’t been involved with anything whatsoever in a decade.
They’re stuck in some murky middle ground. If there were just one store, it wouldn’t matter nearly as much how chaotic its processes were, because you wouldn’t be trying to duplicate it elsewhere. If there were fifty stores, say, or even probably just a dozen, then things would have to be more organized by default — you wouldn’t get to that level otherwise. Certain folks would have naturally replaced some of the others, and they’re part of the reason you got there, while others would require being forcibly removed.
Now they’re in a position of just waiting out certain veteran holdout figures, to move on or something. With only three stores, they are still weighted down with the baggage of numerous key people just doing whatever they feel like, because they’ve gliding along here for an eternity and are used to getting their way. Or even people like Vince freaking Brancatto who hasn’t even been around all that long, who’s just relying on ancient industry connections to throw some misplaced weight around.
This is expected, though, however painful a process. What she finds ridiculous and perplexing, though, is how in select instances, the same individual is held to a proper normal business standard at Bellwether, but when it comes to the Wholesome Healthy Hippie Shopper Market, the reaction is more along the lines of, eh, whatever, buddy, do what you can with that mess. Like you take Felix here, who is a nice guy and everything, though that’s not really the point. Now that the stores have switched over from Orchestra to Slingshot, one of the major pieces of that purchase was that it would integrate with Great Plains, making some of this madness a lot more seamless. He has taken his sweet old time tackling this, however, to the extent that even Reece down in Orlando has asked what is happening with this. His answer is always that he’s working on it, though she is beginning to suspect that he might be over his head, and hasn’t even started. This response would never be permitted to fly if a Bellwether project instead.
Not that Glenda is complaining about her job. It would certainly be easier on many levels to continue doing things the same old way, charging these invoices to whatever department they’re coded to, however they come down the pipeline. The problem is that the coding stamps on these puppies have gotten increasingly more erratic and bizarre. Edgar no longer has to go line by line through every invoice, checking to ensure these were being charged to the correct department. This is because with the new software, once an item has been added to their computer system, when the back dock receivers check in every shipment, it automatically splits these items out, adds them to the inventory for that item, in the correct department.
The problem this is creating is that half the employees are now stamping the invoices, writing whatever department they feel like in the little red box, and turning these in, without him in the middle to verify these invoices before they’re loaded on the truck to her. He’s not verifying them any longer because this should no longer be needed, and isn’t, for the half who are doing things correctly. The way he and the back dock receivers have explained it to Glenda, all you have to do is bounce over a few tabs on the computer screen and it shows you exactly how that shipment was broken out, by dollar amount, by department. You can even print that out if you like. Some follow this procedure and some don’t. The ones who don’t, they often prefer to make up their own department, sometimes literally — in many instances she’s receiving coding stamps for departments which don’t even exist. She received one the other day which someone had charged to “Herbal Classes.”
And half the employees are getting away with this because half the store managers allow it. Because they think that this passive protest is going to work, because if they fight it long enough, these programs will go away.
