Would that 4 Hour Workweek guy recommend spending a ton of one’s time on the phone? Glenda Jackson seriously doubts it. As the current accounts payable person for Healthy Hippie Market, fully hemmed in up here at the Bellwether Snacks headquarters – kind of like that one country in Africa which is completely surrounded by another, or maybe those weird, landlocked city-counties inside Virginia – she has ample opportunity to observe and overhear just how much talk is generated by every other cubicle around here. The funny thing is, they recently installed these supposed noise cancelling ceiling doohickeys up above, which seem to have accomplished nothing. Oh, she doesn’t doubt that they work, on a purely technical level. Problem being, however, that the introduction of these just made everyone talk louder. Because they really like the sound of their own voices. These folks are not about to lose their voices in the depths of some noise cancelling thingamajiggies. And yes, much of this chitchat is conducted on the phone.
A healthy portion of the phone interaction is probably unavoidable. The accounts receivable team, understandably, seems to get better results shaking people down over the phone than they do via email, or at least this is the case with certain chronic offenders. That’s why Glenda has always preferred AP, actually – folks are always happy to hear from her. Vendors, that is, the vendors HHM does business with. If she’s inquiring via email about a certain figure owed, then these vendors don’t care how they receive word, even a telegram delivered by horse or an airplane dragging the message behind it would suffice. As for contacting anyone employed at HHM itself, however, now this is a different story.
They are hands down the most disorganized bunch she has ever worked with in her professional career. Or in any other realm, really. Fortunately, this job is overall a breeze, after becoming familiar with the Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains program. There are certain procedures that must be followed to the letter, sure, which require focus, but she doesn’t have to dedicate a ton of brain power to keeping up her end of the bargain. This is good, because the brain power required to sort out the Healthy Hippie mayhem means her typical week is only just barely manageable. She couldn’t let them know this, of course, because they would then (for they are nothing if not crafty with their excuses and rationalizations, most of them) claim that this is intentional, as they know she has an easy job and they figure she has time to sort it all out.
No. There are a handful of extremely solid people scattered throughout the stores, ones who almost never make a mistake – yet when they do are the first to admit it, paradoxically enough. The stores seem to have anywhere from two to four such individuals each, which is probably just the precise amount needed to just barely skate past all the chaos. The others range from mostly competent, even if they aren't quite up to par on details down to this person is so disorganized there's no way he/she is effective at his/her job.
Of course, Glenda is only dealing with the upper level store employees, the managers and merchandisers. She has never met nor had any interaction with the manual labor army underneath, unless maybe one of them happened to answer the phone. But at present, her go-to figures are Shelly, Brian and Trudy at Palmyra; Tonya and Chloe at Independence; Craig and Pablo at Southside; Candace at Arcadia; and then the merchandisers Dale and Arnie; Teri Barnette, who is also here at the Bellwether HQ in a part-time IT role, though no longer technically an HHM employee; Duane Hatley, running the show and clearly someone who knows a great deal about the industry, if somewhat intimidating to interact with at times; and then Edgar Lodge, their all-purpose numbers and database guy.
Maybe she's partial to Edgar, because he was after all the person who had trained her in this position, the person she replaced as the lone AP employee. Glenda isn't quite sure what went down two years ago, except that Edgar had a falling out with the HHM showrunners and jumped ship over here to assume this Accounts Payable role. Then this summer past, Duane had asked him to return to his former position at the stores, because various procedures had completely jumped the track without Edgar. That's when Glenda was hired here, bringing her broad range of experience, as an early-middle-aged black woman with tremendous industry experience, into this office job which paid okay and had decent benefits, but which she could in all reality sleepwalk through on autopilot for the most part…except, again, the often brain-twisting experience of dealing with the employees at those stores.
She should be thankful for this novelty, perhaps, although another example of something she would never be insane enough to actually mention to them. Regarding this vast majority, the roving mob of problem children, some are competent though combative, with vitamin manager Zaire Patterson probably at the top of this list. Select others, like Destiny Davis, only fall into combativeness when Glenda pushes hard enough against her airheaded hippie shtick. Corey Brown attempts talking his way out of every jam with the basic philosophy that whatever he's improvising right this moment is the correct answer, and whatever else he might have said earlier or that anyone else is saying is irrelevant - a tactic that doesn't work nearly as well as he thinks, though Rob Drake does remain curiously smitten with the guy. Most, though, fall under that dubious banner of being world class experts at disorganization, legitimate masters in this realm. Were this an Olympic sport, some of these folks would surely bring home a medal. Among them, she would bet good money upon current deli/meat merchandiser Pat DiStazio standing on the podium for gold.
Fortunately, it does appear that his time with this company might be running on fumes. Word is out on the streets. Nobody turns in late invoices or outright loses them at a greater clip than Pat. Who then responds with bizarre, often incomprehensible, all-caps rants via email or text, defending his position. She has the distinct impression that he drives around for weeks with these invoices strewn loosely around his car. Which therefore summons an all too vivid mental picture of said invoices blowing out of car doors when opened, with the oblivious merchandiser not even noticing as they parasail across the parking lot.
Maybe that's a stretch, but something is happening to these invoices. Fortunately, some of the larger vendors, like produce giant Alfredson's, have their own paperwork in place enough to send out monthly statements, and she can get ahead of the curve - well, not exactly ahead of the curve, maybe, maybe the analogy here is she's able to turn around and deflect a downhill rolling boulder, instead of having it flatten her from behind - to see things which they haven't gotten around to panicking over yet. But these smaller operations, such as this one hummus company up in the mountains, will only contact her when he's about eight or nine invoices behind. In fact during one rare telephone conversation with the son of this family owned hummus operation, the kid had chuckled and admitted they refer to the guy as "Pat Disaster-o," which has subsequently become Glenda's own personal, private nickname for the dude. Because they aren't just squabbling over lost and/or late invoices, Pat is often calling to berate them over orders, too, even though he can never seem to find any reference to the alleged discrepancies, and they are meanwhile able to pull up paperwork on their end in about twelve seconds. She can believe it. And this is surely happening with every single company that Disastero touches.
As such, while yes, maybe she is partial to Edgar, Glenda feels there is at least one major reason to be: his experience almost always neatly matches her own. He's the kind of guy that would keep his lips zipped about these individuals - but if you asked, as a confidential, business-related inquiry, will admit his own take on the situation. She brought up Pat one day to him, and Edgar chuckled, said that DiStazio reminded him of a kid in high school who would have had his papers sticking every which way out of a Trapper Keeper, clearly a runaway mess, with papers visibly falling out behind him in the hall and some even with dirty shoe prints upon them…who would then nonetheless constantly disagree with teachers who accused him of being disorganized and losing his homework all the time.
There's one other additional angle of interest, validating their connection. As chance has it, the woman that Edgar originally replaced in this AP position, Kathy Ames, has recently returned to the company, in a part-time role over in AR. On a couple of occasions while training Glenda, Edgar had made passing reference to some procedures as taught to him by Kathy, which he decided didn't make all that much sense, for which he figured out an improvement. Not to bust her out, only by way of comparison, so that Glenda could see the difference, and why they were doing things in a certain manner.
Upon Kathy's return, this has now led to some reciprocal, similar exchanges, in passing, even though they don't work in the same department. As in, Kathy, who is if nothing else extremely outgoing and chatty, happened to walking past Glenda's desk, and squealed a little amused if perplexed laugh, stopped and leapt to the task, unbidden, to show Glenda how she, Kathy Ames, used to do this, the "preferred" method. Except that thus far, Glenda has never found any reason to favor a Kathy method in place of an Edgar method.
For the record, she likes Kathy a lot, thinks of her as a really sweet, often comical, and highly entertaining person. However, she also happens to be someone who routinely makes things much more difficult and complicated than they need to be (in this regard, Kathy has a great deal in common with Ralph Hedges, the vitamin manager at Arcadia, who, well, would take days to properly discuss). Edgar had mentioned that Kathy just loves to talk, and would therefore rather spend fifteen minutes on the phone with every vendor, all day long, instead of dashing off a quick email. That's one thing, related to personal preferences and productivity. Regarding these infamous now and later handwritten remarks on the invoices, though, which were one of the first procedures Edgar chucked, one of the first therefore which Kathy had felt compelled to jump in to show Glenda, she has to agree with him, this is a total waste of time.
"Now see, what I used to do is - and which you might wanna do, too, although I guess Edgar didn't teach you this - is, okay, you'll get to where you can just look at an invoice, and know which vendor it came from, whether they're on terms or whether we gotta pay em right away. But until then, okay, you can kinda glance at the front and see, okay, it says they're Net 30," Kathy demonstrates by running a long, midnight blue painted fingernail down said invoice, a Universal Foods one that Glenda's processing, until reaching that spot, "so then, whatcha do is, flip the invoice over and write later on the back, see? Then after I get through the entire stack, then it's real easy, see, to sort through and file them in two separate piles, the ones we gotta pay now, and the one's we're payin later."
She batted her eyelashes and looked at Glenda with a broad, expectant smile, clearly hoping that Glenda would recognize the brilliance of this scheme. The only problem with this is that, maybe it's conditioning, but she leans toward Edgar's side of this debate: if you know on sight which pile they go into, then why this need to flip them over and write the destination upon them? Or if you're still unsure and have to visually scan the invoice to see what type of vendor this is, if you're doing that anyway, why not just go ahead and sort it into the correct pile after you determine this? Instead of handwriting a destination on hundreds of invoices every week, then sorting them out after that?
"I mean, I guess you could theoretically make a case that this is just marking the invoice as received," Edgar had drily intoned to Glenda, explaining this side of the debate all those months ago, "except we're already doing that with the coding stamp on front. That's how you know it's been processed."
Edgar himself is pretty funny a lot of the time, once you really get to know him. However, she understands, and even he is aware, why he is perceived as being somewhat humorless and by the books around here. In many respects, it's a matter of survival. He did admit once that a handful of them were cautioned by HR to maybe tone it down with some of the more outrageous emails they were sending to one another. Also, he was once suspended for an on-site altercation with a couple deli employees, and instructed to kindly chill out in-person as well. But for the most part, it's a reaction to the chaos and hysteria, to make a point of slowing things down and patiently explaining exactly what's going on, his impression of the ideal response.
She often turns to him for questions that have nothing to do with what is technically his job, because he is one of the few who seems to know what in God's name is going on around that place. This is a combination, he says, of trial and error, putting out previous fires during even more chaotic times - as difficult a statement as this is to comprehend - and that he must interact with not just all four stores but also the accounting department up here as well. His self-professed interest in nerdy details, and the odd splashes here and there of previous experience.
Regarding some of these particulars regarding her own position, okay, sure, she has enough experience herself to make a few judgment calls, quite naturally. For example just about every department at every store, at least those which have any need for ordering something from Alfredson's, has reams of credits sitting out there, routinely. For whatever reason these constantly turn up as missing. Something about those pages has the look of an inconsequential piece of paper, like a packing slip or thereabouts, which surely plays a part. Yet for the first handful of months, she routinely applied these where they belonged, until realizing that nobody, anywhere, seemed to have any clue about their presence. Employees were unfailingly surprised every time she mentioned such.
Glenda now plays favorites with these credits, so to speak. Whoever is in her good graces gets this added little cherry on top, as she applies the credit to that department, files it and moves on. Suffice to say, Disastero has not often found himself the lucky recipient of this boost to his bottom line, if ever.
Otherwise, yes, she tries to stay off the phone. Kathy might enjoy the endless jaw exercise, but Glenda considers it much more work, while simultaneously a lot less efficient. It feels like screwing off, because it is, and she noted long ago that screwing off on the job made for, paradoxically, a much longer work day, than just zeroing in and focusing upon your job. It's probably no exaggeration that she's saving half a day every week by sending out emails in lieu of making phone calls. And the elimination of those now and letter scribbles wipes out the other half.
