It isn’t just Matt and the RU Data clan with which they’re pressing this ordering business, of course, but Todd as well. Yet he remains as impossible as ever to get a straight answer out of, despite talking constantly. His standard response to anything they’re bringing him is an unimpressed one shoulder shrug, even when your questions concern what is often a situation or concept which originated with him. Maybe mumble something about how you need to figure it out, or insinuating that it’s “user error” and that they’re not on board with or cannot possibly comprehend the wondrous majestic complexity of RU Data. As he then begins to ramble at great length about an entirely different topic. This is, of course, assuming you can even corner the guy.

“He hasn’t responded to me in months,” Sharon tells Edgar, Tuesday morning, as the two of them and Matt are now sitting with Sarah, at Central’s back dock. “I don’t know what I did to piss him off, but yeah. If I call, it goes straight to voicemail. If I send him an email, he never answers it. Never.”

This is the first Edgar’s hearing about such, but it does explain in part one curious reaction, from a small meeting a week or two earlier. Todd, Fred and Edgar were the only three sitting around the conference table at that particular moment. Their thoroughly perplexing leader of course had the HDMI cord plugged into his laptop, to broadcast his email inbox onto the big screen, though this image had remained static for a good half hour as he hadn’t actually done anything with the inbox. By circuitous means, Sharon’s name somehow came up in conversation, a sarcastic remark Todd had made about the people in Palmyra cowering in fear of her.

“I like her!” Fred enthused. “She’s like a bulldog, she goes right after ‘em!” Then he laughs and bares his teeth, clamped together like just such an animal, shaking his mouth from side to side as though tearing into a piece of meat. Todd, however, rocking and leaning back in his chair, hands over his gut, had simply scrunched up his face, with distaste, and not said anything.

Today, of course, Matt, Edgar and Sharon are covering much of the same material as yesterday, except for Sarah’s behalf. While following up on and extending many of the projects already begun, like Matt contacting the EDI vendors. Alongside getting Central up and running on the Hupp program — which is definitely not making Destiny’s day, or anyone else’s here, although they’re blessedly not quite as angry as Candace was yesterday — while Edgar’s own email inbox continues to pile up with the usual stuff, but also the odd Hupp and RU Data related complaint from Arcadia.

So Tuesday is therefore like a repeat of Monday, except with a larger pile stacked on top of it. Which is kind of a nice metaphor for how things are progressing around this place overall. For the record, Edgar loves having so many things going on that he can just barely keep up, and new subjects to learn, because he finds this an engaging challenge — so long as the projects in question make rational sense, that is. The problem is, that last qualifier excludes much of what’s happening around here of late.

What set Sharon off on her latest Todd related rant, for example, concerns this madness concerning the theoretical shutting down of email, as everyone switches to Slack. Maybe the concept behind this is a valid one, who knows. Perhaps Todd is right, perhaps this will save them a fortune and vastly improve communication to boot. But the execution certainly has not been coherent in any sense. Aware that almost nobody is in the habit of checking their Slack, Todd has instructed Felix to set their channel up to where whenever anyone ever gets a new message in Slack…it sends them an email. Which, again, is maybe a smidgen confusing, though Edgar gets the theory behind it, that it might help transition people over. But then his latest decree, after harping on them for weeks to stop using email, is that the handful of them who have actually listened to him and attempted messaging everyone in Slack instead — i.e. Edgar and Sharon and a handful of others — they can’t just expect the fuddyduddies to make this change overnight. Therefore those of them who have embraced the future and cheerfully moved into this bold new era, they are the problem, because they should not just expect the old timers to see their Slack messages. They need to follow up with a phone call and/or an email as well. The ancient and the tech resistant, the Vinces and the Ralphs and the Destinys, however, these folks get a free pass.

With Matt away at lunch and some spare time at their disposal, Sharon asks Edgar if he wouldn’t mind marching over to Todd’s right this second, actually, to discuss this matter in person with him. She’s pretty fired up and he has a feeling she’s going to dominate the conversation, so he doesn’t mind playing wingman. Truth is, it would be good to definitively sort this out, assuming they can pin Todd down in any fashion. Otherwise, Edgar’s mentally turning this into yet another thing he’s mindlessly complying with, and not exerting any brainpower to beyond that, expecting that all of these technophobes will magically make the leap to Slack. Or for that matter, that the email service will ever truly go away. He’s been long accustomed to expressing his point of view on the best way to go about things, or what management expects, and if people balk at that, to just go around them, figure out how to make this work anyhow without their compliance. What’s new is that the guy up top is now one of the people he often has to go around.

“Todd, do you have a second?” Sharon asks, catching their boss off guard as they breeze through the open door. He had been clicking away at something on his computer, but flinches, almost jumping as he recoils slightly from the desk, obviously startled by this sneak attack.

Without even necessarily waiting for a response, as the two of them stand there, Sharon launches into her broadside, railing against Todd’s latest edict. For the most part just nodding as she rants, Todd doesn’t say much, itself surprising, although this might point the way to the best method for getting results from the guy: jump from the bushes at him and just start rambling yourself.

“Now we’re supposed to send two versions of every message, in Slack and email?” Sharon concludes, “I mean, this is just getting crazy!”

“Plus, I mean, we’re already getting notifications in our email inbox, every time we have a message in Slack, anyway,” Edgar adds.

“They might have to shut that off,” Todd suggests.

“Wouldn’t they have to actually go into Slack in order to do that?” Edgar retorts. In truth, someone could have labeled those messages as Junk in Outlook as well, or whatever else they’re using to read their emails, but seriously doubts that anyone who’s avoiding Slack has done so. He’s even overheard Fred Baldwin, after all, boasting about having “more than 700 unread messages” in his email inbox, as if this were a badge of honor, that he’s taking pride in tuning out what he considers noise.

“Yes and see I’ve already got enough on my plate,” Sharon continues, “We’ve already got enough on our plate. Now we’re supposed to say to ourselves, okay, who’s included on this message? Are all of them on board with using Slack? Let me see…hmm, I’m not sure. Maybe I better send this twice. You see what I’m saying? The ones of us who are actually doing it are being penalized, in a way, with twice as much work. Is it mandatory or not? If it is, shouldn’t people like Vince or Fred or…”

“You don’t worry about Vince, okay?” Todd barks, cutting her off by having one hand between them. Then jerks a thumb at his own chest and adds, “I’ll deal with Vince.”

Edgar’s choking down a slight laugh, for numerous reasons. On the surface it’s pretty hilarious, this conversation, like something out of a workplace comedy, presented as “black comedy” possibly, even — though all the participants are totally serious. The second, though, is that they’re shouting about Vince, but to his knowledge, nobody has verified whether that person is or isn’t in the building, a mere two offices over. The third is that Todd will almost assuredly not do anything about Vince, despite this proclamation.

“But we’re still supposed to send messages in both places?” Sharon questions.

“For the time being, yes,” Todd says, standing up, as if he has a pressing appointment somewhere, to wordlessly signal that this conversation is over.

“But Vince…”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll worry about Vince.”

Will he, though? Edgar’s thinking that as far as he’s concerned, if any future messages include Vince, he personally will probably not be sending it in both places. Email will suffice, because, as Sharon had stated, this is getting ridiculous. And this surreal discussion gives him just enough wiggle room, if ever questioned on it, to explain why he has taken this stance.

With Matt due back from his lunch, Sharon and Edgar drift back over to Central, to wrap up this continued RU Data training slash problem solving session. Chief among these, as their star coder here continues to try and make something happen on the EDI front, is Edgar’s insistence that Matt really should move on to setting up the email vendors for them, a point that Sharon readily seconds. Matt continues to chafe at this suggestion, though, for reasons unknown, which seem to vacillate between him not thinking it important at the moment, to him not wanting to tackle this.

“Well, I mean, explain to me again what you’re doing now?” he eventually, reluctantly replies.

“As soon as we hit send, it automatically fires off a PDF of the order, to the vendor’s email address.”

“Okay, so, even if we don’t have that exact scenario set up for you just yet, there’s an option here to export your order to a PDF. Then you could just email it yourself,” Matt explains, bebopping over in a few rapid clicks to that screen.

“Yeah, I saw that, and I actually tried making a dummy order last week, to test it out,” Edgar tells him.

“Oh yeah? What happened?”

Edgar gives him a wan smile and says, “the program crashed. And the PDF never came up.”

“Well, okay, let’s see what happens,” Matt says, begins clicking away again with a fury. This is one of the issues they’ve had over the course of these two days, in fact, which is that he isn’t so much showing them anything, he’s clicking around at a million miles an hour himself. Sharon and Edgar and now Sarah have all had to continually ask him to slow down and actually demonstrate how to do something, so they can take notes and see for themselves, if not try it out firsthand. Another side effect of sending these coders out, perhaps, who are more accustomed to working alone all day in dingy caves, not so much interacting with the public.

Nonetheless, as Matt picks a vendor at random, adds a couple of items, and closes out the order, this is all easy enough to follow. As it is when he picks YES for the option to export this to PDF. At which point the program crashes. And the PDF in question never materializes.

“Hmm. That’s weird,” is all Matt has to say.

Following this afternoon, he flies back to New York, and the others are blessedly able to return to their actual jobs. Time hasn’t exactly frozen elsewhere during this two day odyssey, which means, for example, that others have had to check in product up at Palmyra. While not a bad thing, necessarily, as Shelly for example has had to cover for Sharon before, she doesn’t know anything about RU Data yet and it’s debatable whether any “checking in” is done during these days, as Shelly and store manager Russell sign off on the invoices, and place them on Sharon’s desk to enter when she returns. Edgar has his own theories about that topic, but one is supposed to be supportive of one’s coworkers and not harbor such suspicions without any actual evidence. Besides, it’s really not his problem.

This latter point is especially true when considering how they’d handled the matter of inventory. He is also pinning this one on his Things That Do Not Make Sense mental bulletin board. As in, they had not transferred inventory balances over to RU Data. They had one realistic chance to do so — somewhere between close of business Sunday and start of business Monday — but Todd had blown off this notion. The first time Edgar mentioned it, at a Monday morning meeting, the boss had not said anything in response. The second time, mentioning it to him face to face, Todd had blurted out that he didn’t wish to transfer the inventory balances over to RU Data, because he wanted that system to have a “fresh start.” Whatever this meant. So now the Slingshot balances are forever stuck at their Sunday night tallies, while every transaction on the Hupp cash registers runs the RU Data balances, all of which began at zero, farther and farther into the negative.

What does Reece Leibovitz think of this practice? Oh wait, that’s right, Todd canned her. Well, they do have the seemingly quite capable Wanda Robinson in place now, at least, and Edgar’s thankful for this. Except she doesn’t have nearly as much pull as Reece has enjoyed, and is in fact emailing Edgar for the lowdown, wondering what in God’s name is going on with some of this stuff. As diplomatically as possible, Edgar attempts navigating this tricky minefield where he avoids throwing the current bosses into the wood chipper while at the same time provides some actual information and also tries to not personally take the heat for dumb ideas which were not his doing at all. But must admit to Wanda that he can’t seem to get a “definitive answer” on some of these questions, but figures they will sort this out somehow come inventory time, hee hee!

He’s dealt with this administration long enough to know, however, that what’s likely going to happen is some last minute freakout on inventory day, on the very things he and some others have suggested, which were blown off with a cocky shrug. And that he’ll be expected to perform some sort of crazy spreadsheet magic in combining Slingshot reports with the RU Data reports at that time. As always, anyway, one can’t exactly ponder future theoreticals too long, when attempting to deflect the current missile flying into one’s midst. Particularly as they are constantly arriving.

He had managed to keep up with the daily new items file additions during his two day, mostly wasted training with Matt. Sure, they had learned some stuff, and tackled a couple issues, but nobody would say that was the best use of anyone’s time. Thankfully, considering that neither Edgar nor Sharon really wishes to venture back over to the Arcadia beehive anytime soon to handle in person, she is amenable to training Diane Evans over the phone, on how to receive products on the back dock, and Diane can then show whomever else might need to know. Otherwise, it’s on to the next major project, this new shelf tag system.

For this, Todd has put Edgar in contact with another guy at that software company, HSX. Considering that Park will be the one designing their new tags, and Edgar deploying the information into and out of that system, a conference call is scheduled for the two of them, with Keith from HSX. With Park in Edgar’s office, seated side by side at this desk, they slog their way through a pair of back to back, two hour days, on speaker phone with Keith. Watching his various tutorials on a shared screen, for a program that blessedly doesn’t seem too complicated. The only potential hitch, really, is that the software needs to be set up on a central server down at the Bellwether HQ, which is an angle that Felix is working on.

“That was cool and all, but…not much of that really applied to me,” Park says with a chuckle, stretching, after the final training session has wrapped.

“Yeah, that kind of sucked for you. But at least you got to see how this stuff works. In case you ever need to know that,” Edgar jokes.

“Yeah…”

Regarding this brand new, shiny silver printer now sitting in Edgar’s office, beside the still functional older one, this will be used exclusively for printing out the new shelf tags. The existing professional printers, while suitable and modern enough for most business applications, are like something from a mid 90s office and aren’t adequate up to this particular task, the glossy, full color, perfectly aligned shelf tags and signage. As a result, Todd has requisitioned a handful more of the silver ones, a unit per store.

While Park goes to work on some new designs, Todd and Edgar continue with their rare project together, of determining the ideal shelf tag size. Having sent a case each of the four finalists to the office, these are tested out and carted around from store to store, to see what works best on the shelves, and any relevant employees are also polled for their opinions. In the end, Todd decides he almost likes this one size, and submits a request to Keith for a custom made template — which they have to pay a extra for, every time these are ordered — that is a little bit longer, if a sale price bib is hanging down from it, but also less wide, either way. Meanwhile, Dale decides that he wants to go with this smallest of the four original options, for the vitamin/HBC department alone, because these will work better with his row after row of tightly clustered, frequently tiny bottles.

The only downside is that HSX requires credit card payment up front for every order. So this means, at least for the foreseeable future, each order must be sent to Todd for approval. As far as the shelf tags themselves are concerned, Park really does some exceptional work here. Edgar thinks that these could be the coolest looking designs he’s ever seen, anywhere. The regular shelf tags have an artsy rough-hewn green border around them, on a white background, while the sale ones have a similar looking red border. It’s clean, it’s simple, he loves them.

So this is all set, on those fronts, and comes together with impressive swiftness. But then there’s whole RU Data quagmire. Todd now wants their daily sales figures arranged in a particular format, in an Excel sheet, on the shared drive. He insists upon having these rows and columns in this particular order. But RU Data won’t automatically dump down into their shared drive, and they can’t seem to get any of these expert coders to agree to create a custom made report for them that will download in that particular format. So every morning, Edgar must download these Crystal Reports, convert to Excel, and then pop them into this file he has created on his own computer. The first tab is today’s report, the second tab a pivot table and formulas feeding off it, arranged in Todd’s preferred format. He bounces over to the second tab, copies that, then pastes the values into Todd’s precious report on the shared drive. Which, Edgar considers highly, highly likely, nobody in this or any other universe is ever even looking at anyway.

The reasons he says this is that, despite these convolutions, dropping this report in there once daily (and three times on Monday, of course, one each for Friday-Sunday) might represent a slight improvement on what he’s been doing for the past year — provided he could drop that dreadful routine from his repertoire. Except he makes the mistake of asking, “so then does this mean I don’t have to email everyone the daily reports, now? Since they can just look it up on the shared drive?”

“Mmm, no, keep emailing everyone, too, that way we know for sure they have it.”

So now the morning routine is, Vince popping into his doorway, as always, which is typically just about their only ever interaction on any given day. Standing there with a dour, crotchety face, scratching his leg as Edgar verbally recites the sales figures to him. As he then nods once, and moves on to his own office without another word said. Then Edgar downloading the daily sales info in Crystal Reports, converting it to Excel. Popping it into his file, copying and pasting the reformatted one into the shared drive. Then sending out the same old ridiculous email with this same information sent as an attachment to everyone, per Todd, but then also spelled out in the body of the email, per Fred. That way all the information is “right there.”

But there are historical considerations here as well. Paranoid about losing their sales history once he pulls the plug on Slingshot — even though Edgar could surely cobble together whatever anyone was looking for in various saved files all over the place, not to mention the small galaxy of emails he has sent — and with RU Data unable to communicate with that program, Todd has asked Edgar, in his quote unquote free time, to start dumping down every last bit of their historical sales information, by store and day and department, into the shared drive, quite naturally into this specific arrangement that Todd has concocted for them, too.

By now, it seems fairly well established that they have fallen into the clutches of a madman. Still, flights of lunacy aren’t necessarily the end of the world, if Todd can still, however chaotically, steer them in the right direction. Everything continues to feel up in the air, that they could head either direction, despite this constant, quite often nonsensical turmoil. Some of the problems they are already running into, during their first ever week with this RU Data/Hupp conglomeration in place of Slingshot, is sale batches not sending to the cash register. So the teams for both companies are looking into that problem, each inclined to point the finger at the other.

Yet on the flipside…they are opening a new store. At long last, it is finally happening. Hot on the heels of that Indian Lake proposal falling through, the paperwork has already been signed, the deal finalized, on an entirely different concept. A little over a year into the Todd Cashner regime, in slightly less than two months, they are slated to open up shop in Lorena, a town at the foot of the mountains, about halfway been Walnut and Boone. However this one turns out, many of them have the feeling that it will permanently establish whether or not this management team knows what it’s doing.