When you open your eyes, you’ll see that life is cubicle.
Modern efficiencies can be great, if that saved time is put to good use. This is one of the things Glenda thinks about often, as she’s humming along entering invoices, in her island of a cubicle at the Bellwether HQ. If you are banking that time to get better at your job, be it by catching up on other things, or learning more, or tinkering around in an attempt to find even better methods, then this is great. But the problem with everything being faster these days is that often, all it’s accomplished is…making everyone expect everything that much quicker, so that you’re not really saving any time and certainly not much stress.
Not that she’s really all that stressed, not that she’s complaining. But there are plenty who are stressed to the gills by today’s frenetic pace, and the only reason she’s not is by finding more efficient ways to do the exact same thing, yet not revealing this little tidbit to anyone. Which allows her to study up on her job, and experiment.
Plus, you’ve got to learn which people to avoid. There are about three or four different vendors who are continually hassling her over money, small time local ones all, and while she feels for these folks to some extent, on the other hand, she’s explained the timeline to them repeatedly and they just don’t seem to get it. Or are willfully choosing to ignore her explanations, as though believing she’s just making things up, she’s not sure. One of these, a handmade greeting card company called Holistic Messages who apparently only got into the HHM stores because Janis Drake spotted them at a craft fair or something, years ago, recently copied the Drakes on yet another email sent, demanding payment on an invoice that was not yet two weeks old. Sending an email only because, as always, with these few trouble vendors, Glenda sees that number pop up on the caller ID at her desk, and she’s not coming anywhere near that phone. They can leave her yet another voicemail, and she will email them a response. But, yes, as she explained it to this knucklehead, yet again, which by extension went out to Rob and Janis as well, this dude can expect his check no sooner than two and half weeks from when he dropped off the product.
“Why on earth would it take TWO AND A HALF WEEKS!? We’re in Chesboro…you’re in Chesboro!!” was the eventual response.
As Glenda reiterated in a separate email chain with just Rob and Janis, who should probably know the answers but were also questioning this, if this guy is dropping off his greeting cards on a Monday, which he is, although it doesn’t matter what day of the week he’s doing so, the stores don’t process their weekly paperwork until the following Monday. Which means Glenda doesn’t begin receiving store paperwork herself, including this joker’s invoice, until Tuesday afternoon, when somebody brings it over on a truck, and won’t have all of them, typically, until Wednesday afternoon. She spends the remainder of the week entering these into Great Plains, along with other assorted balancing measures. Checks they then cut every Monday morning, a process which takes her about half the day. Rob signs them, they run these through the mail machine, and they are set out for mailing that afternoon. So depending upon how long it takes the United States Post Office to do its thing from that point…yes, you’re looking at two and a half weeks.
“You could make your deliveries on, say, Friday instead,” she once suggested, in the early days before she knew to avoid all phone interaction, “then you’d probably get your check in a little less than two weeks.”
“Why would that make the check come faster?”
“It wouldn’t come faster, technically. Chances are you’d be getting it on the same day as if you delivered on a Monday. All I’m saying is it would be less than two weeks that way. Your turnaround time would be shorter, if money’s kind of tight.”
“Who said money’s tight?”
Right. But yes, it’s always the same with these three-four problem children. Or make that problem adults who act like children. One of these, an equally belligerent dude bringing ionized water to the stores, even showed up here in person, on a single occasion, demanding payment on the spot. On that day she was kind of surprised and impressed to see Rob telling this guy to take a hike, that they don’t handle things this way. There’s also this weary older lady, making her own energy bars out in the boondocks north of town, who always sounds like she’s on the verge of a breakdown — even in print, you can just tell — every time Glenda explains this to her, and a spaced out beekeeper guy over in Waxoff that also seems continually baffled by this process.
Part of the confusion, she will admit, is that the stores apparently used to write these people, and a whole lot of other ones, checks on site. But for the most part they began weaning these vendors off that program over a year ago, she is told. Their corporate accountant, Reece Leibovitz, has in more recent times put her foot down and told them to knock it off completely — they don’t have a choice with the alcohol invoices, which state law dictates need paid when delivered, but those are the only exceptions — because more polite approaches were not quite cutting it.
Edgar said they were trying to get the store managers to stop near the tail end of his stint as the AP guy, and she’s experienced the same difficulties since taking over. These same whiny local vendors and more would bellyache for payment upon dropping off their wares, even though nearly all had agreed to terms prior to ever placing their product at the stores. Among other problems, apart from the whole common decency bit of these damn vendors sticking to their word and not complaining about the agreement, was that the store would often cut them a check, then someone would turn in the invoice like normal anyway, at which point a theoretical accounts payable person would theoretically not have the first clue that someone had theoretically already paid these folks, at which point said theoretical AP person would log the invoice and cut them another theoretical check for the same theoretical delivery.
One day she sent another of these roughly monthly emails reminding store managers to stop doing this, when she just so happened to find out, a few hours later, that Vince freaking Brancatto at Southside had turned around and written one of these vendors a check again. Vince whom she actually broke down and placed a phone call to last month, after sending him and all the other managers yet another reminder, only for the checkbook to arrive days later and see that he’d written some, once again, after that email.
“Hey, um, a sent y’all another email a couple of days ago…you know, Reece really wants us to cut this out, us writing checks to the vendors.”
“Okay, I’ll take a look at it,” Vince said, which wasn’t exactly reassuring as it implied — not that this was a newsflash, necessarily — that he still hadn’t read an email from three days ago.
Still, this duplicate payment scenario, while annoying, and requiring subsequent untangling that she alone must deal with, doesn’t really get her blood boiling in quite the same way that the latest outrage had. Following their last heated exchange, the Holistic Messages nimrod had driven directly over to Southside, bitched to Vince, who nodded in sympathy and wrote the dude a check yet again. If not for having a secret someone on the inside at that office, who knows what they’re trying to accomplish here and is helping them out, she wouldn’t have been tipped off until the checkbook log was turned in weeks later. As it stands she has proof of this within hours, and admittedly goes a little ballistic.
Store Managers: We need to stop writing checks to the vendors! I just TOLD one local vendor yet again that he has to wait for payment on the terms that he agreed to, so then he drove over to the store & complained & was handed a check on the spot! This is making us look idiotic!
To this, she received just two responses, the first within minutes from Destiny Davis:
Idiotic!? Did you seriously just say we look idiotic?
Well, yes, in a sense considering you are the store manager and Vince is just your assistant. But take that how you will. When Glenda composes herself and responds in somewhat more diplomatic tones, Corey eventually replies:
I will handle it.
She’s not exactly holding her breath on that front. But that blunt email was maybe just the brute force attack needed, however messy, in that this problem is almost entirely eradicated moving forward. And who knows, maybe Corey really did finally nip that one in the bud himself.
This latest request from Reece is a little strange though, brought to light by whatever process she’s engaged in down there in Orlando. Yet another complication in this already exceedingly bizarre company structure (like for example how HHM’s stores send their Bellwether Snacks invoices to her, she processes them, cuts a check each Monday along with everyone else’s, but then walks it over two cubicles and drops it on the AR lady’s desk) are that this Chesboro HQ, though still referred to often as the HQ, is in fact just a ceremonial HQ, really, in deference to the old man Walter Locke’s continued involvement. Most of the company’s major players are now located in Orlando, have been for years, among them Reece. For the most part that doesn’t matter much, not during these modern, hyperconnected times, though it has kept her from regulating certain situations (re: checkbook madness) in person.
Can you look into why these stores are using so many different vendors to order their produce? Each store is ordering from 3–4 companies and they’re all completely different from one another. Seems like we should be able to streamline this a bit.
Glenda can see this both ways, but it sounds like this request might be a little more up Edgar’s alley. After a little more discussion, it’s agreed that they’ll rope him into this project instead. She starts out by explaining that Reece wanted her to get to the bottom of this, but she feels as though this is more in his wheelhouse. He replies to both of them, maybe an hour later:
Hoo! Fun times! Good luck with that, ha ha. I have brought this up from time to time, actually, because the costs are all over the map, too. But yeah I’ll be happy to revisit this topic with them.
