a fortress that wasn’t barricaded quite enough

In what Edgar’s come to think of as an inverted version of his Office Basics 101 class from a year ago, they are gathered in a similar number, in the same location. A couple of the same faces, even. The only difference this time around is that, if given the opportunity to name this forum, he might be tempted to call it Disgruntled Hippie Town Hall.

This time around, Dale wasn’t about to make attendance mandatory for his vitamins managers. Yet, two of the three have shown up anyway, which Edgar could have just about guessed: Sondra and Ralph. The third vitamins/HBA manager, a friendly, slightly older woman up in Palmyra, Nicole, he blessedly almost never hears from. She’s kind of an airhead — or rather, Edgar actually suspects, she pretends to be an airhead sometimes — but his only complaint there is she keeps handstickering prices onto items that don’t scan. And if that’s the worst it ever gets, then he is in fact NOT complaining about this person, not internally or to anyone else.

A somewhat surprising pair of faces have ridden down from Palmyra, however, in the form of Sharon and Shelly. The former is surprising in that she and Edgar actually have a good rapport, are working closely together via email and/or phone just about every day, and she’s not even really here to bitch about anything per se. Aside from the most obvious catalyst — Shelly needed a lift, unless she wanted to ride her moped for an hour plus each way — Sharon’s presence is something of a mixed bag. He believes that she does genuinely want to help. However, he thinks that she also constantly inserts herself into situations that don’t necessarily warrant her involvement, and the reason for that is that she’s always on the lookout for opportunities to potentially grab more power.

Otherwise, Fred is seated off to the side, on the couch, with a yellow legal pad upon his lap. Valerie is also behind her receptionist’s desk, though not involved, with no need to transcribe the minutes as Fred is taking notes of everything this time. Just days ago they did at last complete construction of the new offices, too, which means the conference table has now been moved into the back corner office. This gives them all the room needed for the current meeting, with Edgar and his laptop behind one small folding table, the other four in a row of chairs, on the other side of a slightly larger folding table.

Ralph of course can’t resist kicking off the meeting with his standard complaints about scrubbing data and the database allegedly being so out of whack that he can’t possibly trust that his inventory’s correct. As well as the expected correlated claim, when pressed for examples, that he doesn’t have time to constantly check for and then send this purported mountain of errors to Edgar. But no, can’t remember any specifics off the top of his head.

Once again, though, as far as Edgar is concerned, this is just more of the vague garden variety griping which will never end. Lately it has occurred to him, while viewing TV and pondering the slant of this one Starch Palace commercial, that the types of vagueness we constantly encounter in life fall into a few basic categories:

Cynical vagueness: the ability we have to always make vague insinuating wisecracks without actually conveying any information. Like, okay, take that commercial, the one which sets him off thinking about this concept. It’s kind of like when a bunch of people are sitting around watching a show, and one company’s slogan is, “nobody outstarches the palace!” Someone (there is always someone) will say, “oh, there are places that outstarch the palace, trust me!” and everyone will kind of snicker and agree and think this is incredibly hip and wise.

In the workplace, this attitude can infest and spread like wildfire. Because in a sense this smarmy vagueness will always be true, so any of the cynically inclined among your workforce are always going around spewing stuff like this. But it’s like, so what? You haven’t conveyed any actual information, so what good is this scattershot negativity? Anytime someone suggests something is good, they snicker and roll their eyes and vaguely hint at the opposite. And yes this will always be somewhat “true,” so these people have their backers, and bully for them.

Sassy vagueness: This is a step lower, and more something you’re going to encounter in your personal interactions, not necessarily work related. This is more of something you’re expected to put up with a from a girlfriend. Like when she and all her female chums are sitting around and saying, “well, we all know Edgar’s dumb” or even a blanket statement such as “guys don’t know anything about ________” and they all agree. This is more benign and generally something you’re expected to just be a good sport about.

Hostile vagueness: This is a step higher than cynical vagueness, meanwhile. Hostile vagueness is a weapon management often utilizes, whereby they just hint that someone sucks, or make their own blanket statements about things not being right and so forth, and they’re going to clean house around here, though also without providing any actual specifics.

There are surely more categories than this (“oh, there are people who can outcategorize Edgar’s theory, trust me!”) but that covers the major divisions, off the top of his head. But, as he has to respond to Ralph with some specifics of his own, though really wishing they would not even have to justify the guy’s endless nonsense at this point, Edgar brings up the recent challenge thrown down at his bosses’ feet: feel free to take every vendor file and compare it to what our Slingshot system says, and if you still think you can say that the “database” is the problem around here, then he will buy you lunch or give you his $100 Christmas bonus or something.

“We’ve got about 25,000 items in our system at this point. If there are more than…I don’t know, thirty that have the wrong pack size, I would be astounded,” Edgar adds, “and even some of those are probably situations where, like with that electrolyte packet deal we’re always talking about, they keep flip-flopping it themselves in their price list.”

“Well, I hear you, I do, and that’s all fine,” Ralph croaks, “but it’s just like the other day, you know, I left you a verrrrry detailed message about the body washes we had to order from Harmony Hill and…”

Though trying his best not to cut people off, and let them have the floor, he already knows where Ralph is going with this. Yes, yes, Universal shown this product line as singles and Harmony Hill as arriving in boxes of six, though this turned out not to be the case; a dilemma further compounded in that there are situations where the two companies will ship the same product differently. It’s just another iteration of the same basic concept — these things don’t identify themselves, it takes someone stumbling upon the discrepancy, but they are exceedingly minor in the grand scheme of things and are almost always corrected within the month.

Therefore, he can’t quite help shorting out Ralph’s metaphorical microphone in this instance. Not to mention that, if they allowed him to finish every thought, this meeting might take three times as long. As a side note, Edgar occasionally zones out when the cantankerous old vitamins manager is rambling anyway, thinking that it’s curious how Ralph always has plenty of spare hours to allot for showing up at these bitch sessions. Also, Edgar feels like he could auto-reorder Ralph’s entire department for the entire week, in the time it has taken him to drive over here and complain about things.

“…okay but like I was telling you, those things are gonna happen, and unfortunately, yeah, it does take a human to stumble upon them when they do. But I mean, these, like, random situations don’t even happen all that much and…”

“Huh,” Ralph scoffs and rolls his eyes.

“…they don’t happen all that much in the grand scheme of things, and are really not throwing off your numbers that much when they do. It’s like I keep saying, it’s way easier to just open up an Auto Reorder and hit send, then see what might need changed after the fact. Instead of walking the department constantly filling out orders by hand, and obsessing over every number before you send it. I mean, you can always review a CAO order before you commit anyway and…”

“I’m actually not a big fan of CAO,” Todd announces from the next room over, seated behind his massive desk, as he has been all along, though these are the first words he’s said.

“Heh?” says Edgar.

“Nope. Not a big fan,” Todd concludes.

A silent pall follows, other than the dark cackles emanating from Ralph’s seat. He surely takes this little victory as all the validation he will ever need, from here to eternity. And who can blame him? Great, is all Edgar can think, meanwhile, just what we need. How far has that little comment set us back? And unless Todd has something better in mind, what was the point of it, anyway?

“Well…uh…Rob does want us using CAO as much as possible, that’s part of the whole reason we switched over to this perpetual inventory,” Edgar staggers onward, in summary, “so, you know, pick one of your smaller vendors. What’s the worst that can possibly happen? Pick a smaller vendor and create an order, see what it says. Fine tune your levels if you need to, and send it. If something’s off with the inventory, you’re gonna see it then. This is still much easier, to fix things on the back end after the fact, than walking your entire department all the time.”

“Can I just say something?” Sondra interjects at last. Edgar had been waiting for the moment she would chime in. Her anger is visible and none too surprising, although the angle she takes is largely unexpected.

When she is given the all clear to proceed, Sondra continues, saying, “I don’t have a problem with that so much, but what are we gonna do about all of these failing orders?”

“Failing orders?”

“Yes! My orders are constantly failing to go through. It happens all the time! We can’t rely on this! At this point I’ll bet you it’s a good 20% of my orders, if we’re placing them with Slingshot, they don’t go through.”

“Twenty percent? What? No. There’s no way. Not even close,” Edgar tells her.

“How would you know? You don’t know,” she insists.

“Well I do know that just about every time you guys contact me about a quote unquote failed order, it turns out that the thing is still sitting there open. It was never even sent.”

“We don’t call you every time it happens,” Sondra replies. To which Edgar’s thinking, yeah, well, this surely goes both ways and is pretty much a wash: how many times are you flipping out and cursing under your breath about a “failed” order, before discovering on your own that it was still open? “And I mean, like last week, we went three days without being able to order Sunrays!”

“That Sunrays situation, that was on their end. They had a glitch on their end. They told us that. They emailed you and me and Dale and everybody else.”

“That still doesn’t help us with our ordering.”

“No, but at the same time, these things are gonna happen. If the EDI connection has a glitch on their end, then that’s out of our hands. Every company trying to order that way from them would have the same problem. That really has nothing to do with Slingshot. A company’s email service could be down, or their phones. Or their power could even be out.”

At this, Sondra actually throws her pen down. “Why are you so defensive!?” she demands.

“I’m not defensive, I’m just saying. There’s no way you’ve got very many orders failing. There have been a couple of weird isolated incidents, like bulk orders were not going through here at Central for some reason, for just this one company. But we figured that out right away, and that was months ago. I think it’s more of a training issue, you know, and I mean, if your people know that this happens a lot, that it turns out to be an order was left open most of the time, then they should probably look at that first before they even…”

“Okay. Okay,” Sondra nods forcefully, cutting him off, as she grabs her pen again. And it’s not an okay of agreement, it’s more the way someone will say okay to you in place of I’ll show you or you’ll see. Which is verified as she blurts, “I’m gonna email you EVERY TIME one of our orders fails!”

“Alright. Sounds good.”

She’s scribbling furiously away in her notepad as Fred adds, almost forgotten over there on the couch, “include me on those, too.”

“Okay, sure,” she continues nodding and slashing, “I will.”

Blessedly moving on from this hostile exchange, he must now field Shelly’s anticipated beefs. Dealing with Shelly is a bit trickier, however, for she is much more calculating than these other two. She’s not going to explode with any kind of outburst like Sondra, or even Ralph’s garden variety crankiness. A calmer exchange is certainly appreciated, then. The only downside is that you never really quite know what’s going on with Shelly, and suspect she is playing multiple angles.

“What we’re running into is, we’re seeing a lot of, the cashiers are saying they’re sending you these applications with the discounts, but the discounts aren’t working…”

“Well, you know, I do hear that a lot, but I can tell you what it almost always ends up being. I mean, in all this time, we’ve only found one…no, make that two, we did find another last week…but yeah, we’ve only found two instances so far where someone sent me an application, and I missed it. The rest of the time, here’s almost always what it is: the same person applied for two or three cards, but the cashiers only sent me a discount for one of them. Then he’s showing up with the other card and complaining the discount doesn’t work.”

Shelly nods, conceding, “and I know that’s a problem some of the time, but, I don’t know, it just seems like we’re having a lot of problems with these discounts. If we just had a way to look the customers up…”

“Todd doesn’t want the cashiers to be able to look anyone up. The whole reason behind these cards is we think there was a lot of abuse going on before, with out of control discounts. If they can just pick out some name at random that they know has the discount, then it wouldn’t really solve that problem.”

“And I get that,” Shelly says, “but that’s just what they’re telling me, that they’re constantly sending in these applications, and the discounts aren’t showing up.”

“I’m not sure what else to tell you,” Edgar shrugs, “they should maybe mark the applications as sent, somehow, and maybe date or initial them or something? Also I would say they need to stand there at the scanner and make sure it actually goes through — I mean if you’re hitting SEND and walking off, the way the internet is up there…that’s probably not gonna work, you know what I mean?”

Shelly of all people should be aware of what she’s dealing with up there. With twelve years on the job, she’s not just the longest tenured at Palmyra, but she’s second only to Destiny now, period. Specific to her own store, though, with even the part time fuckup Steve having suffered a mild stroke and retiring, there’s Trudy clocking in at about seven years, and otherwise, nobody else up there even has half as much at that location.

And oh, what a location it is! Granted, whatever they’re doing up there, it’s working — sort of — from a pure dollars-generated standpoint, as far as being the best of the three locations, edging out Central most weeks. Of course, there are those who would say if they truly had their act together, that store should be pulling in $200K a week, easy, but that’s another topic for another day. Regarding the staff, though, it remains the epitome of pure wackiness, perhaps best exemplified by a recent example suffered by Shelly herself.

At home and cleaning out her bird cage just before coming in for a closing shift, she somehow managed to get a finger caught inside, which one of the winged creatures pecked to hell before she was able to extract it. She felt okay enough after this incident to make it into work…but then passed out on the floor shortly thereafter, bonking her head fairly well in the process. Upon reviving her, the collected brain trust decided that what she really need was some orange juice, iron, and electrolytes, which they administered before calling Shelly’s boyfriend. He promptly goes off on them for not dialing 911 or just driving her to the hospital themselves.

“You know what I’m saying, though?” Edgar continues, “I mean, like the other day, one your cashiers called me up, complaining that some woman was standing there and she supposedly kept signing up for cards with senior’s discounts. Well, it turns out that she signed up for one. The husband signed up for one. The husband and wife also signed up for one, together. But a discount was only turned in for one of the three cards. That’s just not going to work. I guess they need to ask these people if they already signed up for a card?”

Maybe Shelly realizes that she was one of the 9-to-1 voices voting yay in favor of this card setup, and can’t really complain about the convoluted process. At any rate, she has little to say now. It gives him a perfect opportunity for pressing forward with what he thinks is a greater issue, anyway.

“But…,” he clears his throat, trying to think of the most diplomatic way to say this, “…I don’t know, it just seems like we’re having way more problems with these cards at Palmyra than we are at the other two stores. It’s just…I know the cashiers are busy, but still, it’s not that complicated, not for this amount of chaos. It almost makes me feel like someone doesn’t like this concept, period, and is sabotaging it on purpose.”

“What!?” Sharon speaks up now, genuinely aghast to some extent, though also possibly putting on a show for Fred and Todd, “sabotaging it? Oh no! I know for a fact that no one at our store would intentionally sabotage something like this!”

Well, he’s not necessarily certain this is the case, either. That’s why he said it just feels like this might be happening. But to declare that you know for a fact nobody at Palmyra would ever do something like this, that’s laying it on a little thick.

“I don’t know, but…it just seems a little weird to me that we’ve had hundreds of cards given out up there where there’s no application whatsoever on file,” he says, “and it isn’t like they forgot to send the application to me — they never even filled one out. Meanwhile we’ve had…maybe two or three each turn up like that, at the other two stores? That’s a huge disparity! I mean, how would you explain that?”

“Okay, so what’s going on there,” Shelly immediately replies, in her typical breathless fashion, running both hands through her hair before she launches into this detailed explanation, “is, okay, apparently someone — I don’t know who — but someone apparently left a bunch of cards sitting out in the open. And so the customers were just going through and grabbing them apparently because they thought they were gonna get some extra discounts or something and they never filled out an application. I don’t know who it was and it may have been multiple people but yeah, that’s apparently what happened with those.”

While Shelly speaks, Sharon opens her mouth, as though about to say something, but then abruptly stops. Sits instead with brows knitted, deep in thought, with the occasional quizzical glance over at her assistant store manager. It’s always dangerous to ascribe definitive thoughts to people based solely upon appearance, but yeah, Edgar would say it looks like Sharon is rethinking some things right about now. Like just maybe these two have talked at length about this topic, and Shelly never once mentioned such.

Times like these are when you wish Sharon would maybe calm down a little bit. Whether ascribing it to attempted power grabs, or whatever else her motivations might be, she tends to launch herself into these situations, positioning herself as a savior of the people. Thus is all too eager to buy into their outlandish, over the top complaints. Only subsequently realizing, no matter how many times this same sequence plays out, that just maybe some of these folks are full of shit. Then wants to shrug and flap her hands and apologize — which is appreciated, sure, but still — as she blurts out a pained, “okay, okay, I didn’t know! I’m sorry! How was I supposed to know?”

Perhaps don’t get involved in these matters in the first place? That recommendation is always at the top of the list. This way it wouldn’t even matter whether you do or do not have all the facts of the case. He knows he is certainly not attempting to get involved in matters outside his purview, though that is admittedly a constant struggle — not on his end, rather that they keep roping him into them. So basically the exact opposite of the Sharon Tolliver approach, willfully inserting herself. But really, none of this matters, not when you boil things down to a single, simple question: is he the only one who believes that Shelly’s explanation sounds like total far-fetched nonsense? Based upon Sharon’s facial expression, he’s guessing that’s a no.

And yet considering Fred’s presence, not to mention that Todd is within earshot, it’s much more crucial to establish what the bosses think. To that end, after the meeting adjourns and Fred follows Edgar into his office, he’s thankful to receive some immediate feedback.

“I think you handled yourself very well in there,” Fred tells him, then chuckles, adds, “you know, I’ve been there myself, and it’s not easy when everybody’s coming after you like that!”

“Thanks,” Edgar replies with a shrug, “my thing always is, we’re on the same team, here. These aren’t, like, personal attacks. Nobody cares if you make a mistake, we just need to establish the best process. Let’s just calm down, you know, and try to figure these things out.”

“Well, that’s definitely true. But yeah, I think you handled yourself really well in there.”

It remains to be seen whether Fred and Todd will remember this, however. Because one thing’s for certain, some of these employees are never going to stop their endless bitching and moaning. Even if rebuffed here, they will just slide over to shoot at another target. So these points scored today, these feel like successful serve returns, they do. But did they win him the match, or is it an ongoing series? His gut tells him this is still the early stages of the tournament, and that both sides are in for a grueling struggle.