Site of the original Name Your Own Price Tool(s): Lorena Meat Department

A couple minutes after Felix breezes back out of the room, Fred materializes, telling Edgar he’s ready now. And as the two of them venture over to the conference room, closing the door behind them, the presence of HR rep Jose Dominguez already seated here would appear to confirm Edgar’s suspicions. Although as it turns out, he has the purpose of this meeting almost exactly backwards.

“The reason I’ve called you in here today is that we’ve reached a decision,” Fred announces, “and we’ve decided that we’re gonna have to let you go.”

“WHAT!?” Edgar shrieks.

“Yes,” Fred says.

“Um…okay…can you tell me what this is all about?”

“It’s the same stuff we’ve been talking about. You’re taking too much on, and holding everything up around here as a result.”

“Like what? I’m not taking too much on,” Edgar insists, shaking his head, “and I’m not really behind on anything.”

“Okay, well, for example: the printers.”

“The printers? What printers? Are you talking about the HSX printers?”

“Uh…I guess so…”

“I’m not working on those printers. I’ve never been working on those printers. Rusty is working on that. I mean, he sent an email just two days ago saying he was about 70% finished with them. Do you want to see it? I think you were copied on that, but…I can pull it up…”

“It doesn’t matter,” Fred says, waving a hand to cut him off, “it’s not just that. Nobody can approach you, everybody’s stupid…we’re just tired of it. We are tired of it.”

“Okay but I feel like the main problem is I keep having to tell you guys over and over and over again that I’m not the equipment repairman around here. That’s not my job. I mean, you look at that sign on my office door,” he points to the next room over, as he had for that laughable review a few months ago, when saying the exact same thing then, “and it says PRICING. But then what are we talking about here, yet again? The first thing you mention is those printers. I’m not in charge of setting up printers…on the server…down at Bellwether headquarters. Come on!”

“Explain to me what your job is,” Jose interjects, the first words he’s yet spoken.

“Sure. The official term is pricing coordinator, or what’s more accurately maybe what you’d might call the database coordinator. I’m basically the person who maintains all of the information for our company, like the prices, departments, tax rates, vendor info. I think this is where the confusion comes in: I’m the guy sending the information to all the programs we use. But not, like, setting up and repairing the equipment. The analogy I like to tell people is that I would be the guy who enters the information that shows up on the channel guide on your TV. I wouldn’t know the first thing about climbing onto your roof to install the cable. Or flying out to… outer space, to fix the satellite…”

“How would you describe management’s performance here of late?” Jose questions.

“Lousy,” is all Edgar says, and at this, there’s no mistaking it, he sees Fred wince.

“Can you give some sort of example?”

“Well, okay, I’ll tell you the first major red flag for a lot of us. It was this day where this semi truck full of product just showed up at Palmyra, which nobody knew anything about. Nobody but management, I mean. Not only that, but they’ve got a bunch of that company’s reps going all over the store hanging a ton of new price tags. Like, thousands of them. People at Palmyra are calling me, saying, hey, all of these new tags are ringing up wrong. I’m like, what new tags? All we could think was, who does this? Who wouldn’t know that this isn’t how you do things? But these guys supposedly have tons of industry experience?”

“You knew about that,” Fred insists.

“What?” Edgar replies, with a disbelieving cackle. So the great rewriting of history has already begun, it would seem. Except in reality, that happened as soon as the episode was over, as Fred and Todd immediately erased from their minds any notion that they’d fumbled the ball. “No I didn’t. Remember, you even came into my office and apologized for how that went down? I mean, it was only…four months ago.”

“You knew about it,” is all Fred can muster, once more.

“No I didn’t. I’d never even heard of MRI until that day. I didn’t meet those guys until about a month later.” As the absurdity of this entire meeting gathers strength and swells, like an impending tsunami, and crashes into the shoreline of his thoughts, Edgar can’t resist another off kilter giggle as he adds, “you totally sent a mountain of product here, and had their people running around hanging shelf tags, before you or Todd thought to tell anyone that they were coming.”

“Okay, well, hang on a second. There’s more,” Fred says, standing up as he exits the room, presumably to go retrieve additional exhibits from the evidence room.

“You should have said something,” Jose tells Edgar, as it’s temporarily just the two of them in this room. “If you have doubts about management’s performance, you should have said something. Why did you not speak up about this?”

“I’m not a complainer. Plus, I like these guys,” Edgar says. Although this last bit isn’t entirely true. He likes Fred. He liked Todd and Ken, at first, and suspects he still would if never working with them, if meeting under different circumstances. The less said about Don Evans the better.

“That has nothing to do with it. If you have doubts about management, you have to let us know. Because you see, now it is too late.”

Well, too late for Edgar, maybe, although there’s a chance he might land a couple of punches, which might benefit those who still remain. And he’s guessing it’s not pure happenstance that Jose went down this road — Rob and Janis must already have some grave concerns about how this regime is executing. Still, for Jose to insist that Edgar should have gone to human resources with beefs about management’s performance, this just makes him wonder whether Jose is lacking in retail experience as well. No place Edgar has ever worked has even hinted that employees should be going to HR just because they think management’s work is shoddy. An actual offense, yes, but not merely for incompetence, for maybe overselling their credentials to start with. Going to HR with this in fact sounds like a great way to hasten your own exit from the company.

As Fred returns, laptop in hand, Jose is prattling on about there being an “open door policy” and that if he had a problem with anything whatsoever, from the company’s direction to the other employees, then he should have spoken up. Then, as Fred pulls out his chair to sit down, Jose glances up at him and says, “how would you describe communication here?”

“Well, see, that’s part of the problem,” Fred replies, then to Edgar says, “I mean, aside from that one little list you sent a couple of weeks ago, we never even know what you’re working on!”

“I sent you another one last Friday, too…”

“Well, if you did, I sure didn’t get it.”

“I sent it to your email address. And to your Slack.”

“Slack?”

“Yes. And the other thing is, the times that I have mentioned what I’m working on to you guys, in person or whatever, it’s like…nobody even knows what I’m talking about anyway. This is the impression I get. Like that email I sent a couple weeks ago: hey, the meat guys in Lorena are making up their own prices. We’ve got two different sets of PLU numbers floating around. Can we do something about this?” Edgar throws his hands up and concludes, “never heard anything from anybody.”

“And how would you describe your own communication?” Jose asks Fred.

“Uh, you know, it could be better, ah…”

Edgar laughs and says, “it could be better. You’re the one always bragging about having over 700 unread emails.”

“That’s true, uh…,” Fred admits, takes off his glasses and begins rubbing his eyes. Circling back to Jose he concludes, “it’s something we’re working on, you know, it’s a work in progress.”

Fred turns his attention to his laptop now, presumably to hunt down this purported bombshell cache of information he has against Edgar. As he does so, Jose continues in a similar vein, saying to Edgar, “you see what I am saying, though, about us having an open door policy? If you had a problem with your coworkers, you should have gone to management. If you had a problem with management, you should have come to me.”

“Well, I mean, there’s a bit of a paradox or double standard or whatever here, though. Because for a while now it’s been, it’s okay for anyone to come flying at you with their own crazy theories, but don’t you dare respond! Or else we’ll accuse you of being antagonistic! Or it’s a quote unquote open door policy, but don’t you dare say anything negative about RU Data! Or we’ll accuse you of being anti-progress!”

Fred, after only a cursory search through whatever he was combing on his laptop, gives up the hunt and says, with a semi-agitated sigh, “I can’t find it. It doesn’t matter. We’ve made up our minds.” Closing the lid on his computer, he points an accusatory index finger at Edgar, charging that, “you’re hiding information on Slingshot…”

Edgar busts out laughing and says, “hiding information on Slingshot? What does that even mean? Who told you that, Ken?” As Fred nods, studying him, Edgar continues, adding, “okay, well, I don’t know how you would hide information on Slingshot. Anyone who ever had access to it, still does. They have to, because they’re still using it for ordering at three of the stores. And printing tags, actually.”

“I don’t know, that’s just what he says. You’re hiding information in Slingshot, okay, because you’re still clinging to Slingshot,” Fred insists, jabbing his index finger in Edgar’s direction still. “You’ve been trying to fight this switch over to RU Data.”

“Whoa,” Edgar replies, waving his arms to cut him off, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing to fight — we already did switch over to RU Data. Months ago. And I did a ton of prepping work before that. That’s been where I do most of my work for months now. You seem to be implying…I don’t even know what you’re implying. But a) I don’t have time to be going around intentionally sabotaging things or whatever, and b) what kind of sense would that make, anyway, because I’d just be creating more work for myself? I mean, you think I like doing double the work, because we still have to repeat all of it in Slingshot?”

“Well, that needs to stop,” Fred huffily declares.

Edgar shrugs and looks at him with a yeah, no kidding expression, saying, “I agree.”

“It just seems awful funny to us that every piece of equipment and program you come into contact with now all of the sudden doesn’t seem to work.”

Though Edgar lands a number of decent jabs, defending himself during this ambush attack, there are just as many points he wishes he’d thought of in the moment, which only occur to him later. But this is surely unavoidable and inevitable. In response to this latest accusation, it will later strike him that this might be the richest and most ironically hilarious charge of them all: for ten years now, he’s been the one getting most amped up about new technology, to the extent that management and even the merchandisers almost always have metaphorically if not actually thrown up their hands and told him to calm down, they have to bring everyone else around slowly, not everyone gets as excited about computer programs as he. Now he is the one they are accusing of being anti-technology.

“That’s not true. Things are working. This RU Data-Hupp-Slingshot-HSX monstrosity is kind of duct taped together, but it’s working, it has been for quite some time. The problem is once again, you know, management just barged into things without asking anyone, then here I end up being the scapegoat when it turns out to be a mess. Or when Todd orders a bunch of tablets and scanners that don’t work. Or the internet sucks or whatever.”

“So what do you think is happening, then?” Jose somewhat perplexingly asks him, as if the preceding rant didn’t spell this out.

Edgar looks over at him and shrugs again, though, repeats, “I’m being made the scapegoat for everything that doesn’t work around here.”

“Well, we have reached a point where we are just spinning our wheels with you. And we’ve made the decision to move on,” Fred declares.

As the accumulated ridiculousness of this encounter washes over him yet again, Edgar shakes his head and starts cracking up once more, staring at no fixed point on the table before him. Then he looks up and announces, which might be directed at either of them, “this is FUNNIEST thing I have EVER HEARD!” Then, directing his attention solely upon Fred, turns to him and insists, “I’m not the problem here! Are you kidding me!? I’m one of the people sorting out the chaos — I’m not adding to it!”

“Well, like I said. We’ve made the decision to move on. You’re just holding us back and we can’t continue to do this. This woe is me, no one can disturb me, hermit in the office routine…”

“Hermit in the office routine? It’s called a desk job. It has always been a desk job. I mean, yeah, I need to be in the stores some — and actually, I’ve been in the stores more here lately than I ever have — but still: it’s a desk job.”

“Yeah, well, it needs to stop,” Fred tells him.

At every company, all over this fair country and beyond, there is a scourge that pundit after pundit has continually bemoaned in these modern times, which is that of the sapping attention span. Right now, businesses are finding it extremely hard to find people who will sit down and focus upon what is currently known as deep work. A high premium is now placed upon people who can actually remain at their desk for hours at a time and stave off the siren call of the internet or their smart phones or their coworkers’ chatter — everywhere, that is, except at Stable 2 Table From Wholesome Shopper Market. S2TWSM alone rises above the fray, a company so advanced that it has no need for deep work. Here and here alone, this is classified as a hermit in the office routine that needs to stop. Of course, the same does not apply to, say, second in command 65 year old types who sit at their own desks and pore over their own numbers all day, to the extent that these figures cannot possibly be expected to even respond to emails.

“Nobody can approach you, you’re not really doing anything for anyone…”

“I do a lot of stuff for these people, okay? Whether they realize it or not. The thing is, I had a ton of really good allies here at one point, but most of them quit. You see what happened? They all quit. Now, for the most part, all you’re left with is a bunch of complainers. A couple of which I think are just mayyyyybe after my job.” Edgar tells Fred. And then one very concise point pops into his head, which sums up how absurd this is, as well as any other he can possibly make. “I’m your best employee,” he says, wagging his own index finger now back at his soon to be former boss, “and you’re gonna find out… pretty quickly, what I’m talking about.”

“Well, the results sure haven’t been there of late,” Fred says.

“Well, once again, without any specifics whatsoever, it’s hard to say what you’re even talking about,” Edgar tells him. He appraises Fred with a level expression, looking him in the eye as he concludes, “but…I think you might have gotten some bad information.”

“That could be, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve made up our minds.”

“Oh my god…,” Edgar laughs and shakes his head all over again, “this is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard…You guys have no idea what is going on in these stores, and it’s really sad.”

But after Jose hands out his business card, saying he is to be Edgar’s only contact with this company from now on, they move onto the formalities of wrapping this up. Fred demands Edgar’s laptop on the spot, and though Edgar requests that he at least be allowed to transfer his personal information to a flash drive or something, is told that Felix will copy this stuff off and send it to him.

Beyond this, it’s just a matter of signing some paperwork. He notices first off that at the top of this single, one sided sheet, the date is shown as 3/17, though someone slashed through that afterwards and wrote 3/24 instead. So apparently, they planned on doing this last Friday. Although in similar fashion right beside that, on the line where it’s asking what corrective action was taken, the word written was originally penned in, also slashed through to now read termination. Near the bottom, it says additional documentation is provided, but there is none — Fred couldn’t find it.

One final point concerns Edgar’s exit notes. Does he have anything? Is there anything whatsoever he would like to state concerning his side of this case? Oh yes, as a matter of fact, there is. Writing it all out now would take days, naturally, but it just so happens that he’s maintained a file of the ongoing predicaments, beefs, and other concerns around this place, right here on this laptop. At first he thinks he should maybe clean up some of the language and maybe redact some names, but then considers, what difference could this possibly make? He’s already been fired.

Only at this place would keeping your head down and attempting to actually focus on your work be considered offensive. Nowhere else. Kind of like how this company is singular in that, no matter how many times someone might come at with you with something that you continually explain is not your job, and you don’t have the first clue how to do it, they’re using this as “proof” that you are a….smarmy know-it-all? But Edgar would seriously like to see an anonymous poll taken on how many people around here consider him more obnoxious than Sharon Tolliver. She is after all one of the two people, if not more, they are presumably going to use to fill his vacated role. They could have saved themselves this entire hassle, really, by taking that poll at any point during his employment here — if he lost that one, he would have resigned on the spot.

As they say on a sports broadcast, let’s go the tape:

Occasions where he complained to one employee about another employee: zero. If they think back to even someone like Pierre O’Brien, if they stop and carefully consider it, do they recall Edgar actually complaining about the guy, ever? No. This is because it did not happen. Or does mentioning to Dale that he saw Marian filling out an order with pencil and paper count as “complaining” about her, particularly after Dale had already opened up the topic? Weren’t they just discussing what the departments were and were not doing correctly? Shouldn’t they have been discussing these matters?

Occasions where he complained to management about another employee: zero

Occasions where he complained to human resources about another employee: zero

Occasions where he complained to another employee about management: two? Maybe? It depends whether that time Vicky asked him about RU Data, and he said, “Todd always gets off on some weird tangent,” counts as a complaint. Otherwise, it’s true that he did refer to Corey as “a fuckin jackass,” that one time, to Valerie, though only after they’d all but demoted him to Pierre’s equal during that weird conference, after Arcadia’s opening.

Occasions where he accosted an employee with some random kooky theory that he cooked up on his own: zero.

And yet, according to management, he’s just way too obnoxious. Far too confrontational, perpetuating some alleged “woe is me” vibe, snarling at anyone who dared speak to him. Well, Fred can say that all he wants. But it’s interesting to note that Jose is all but coming out and telling Edgar the exact opposite — that he should have been a great deal MORE vocal, that this was his problem. And Edgar now sees that he totally agrees with this sentiment.

So this is his big takeaway from this meeting. You think you are taking the high road by quietly going about your work, but you are not. You are turning yourself into a piece of scenery. You are letting everyone else write your narrative. Wherever you find yourself working in life, it doesn’t matter, you should gossip constantly, and complain often. Complain to everybody, all the time, about everyone and everything. Most of all, be sure to go to management with your beefs about all of your coworkers, and to human resources with your beefs about management. It doesn’t matter how petty or misguided these are.

But hey, this place will surely continue its upward trajectory, so what difference does it make! After all, they still have Destiny Davis, gainfully employed as store manager of their busiest location! They’ve still got Vince Brancatto heading up three different departments! Ralph Hedges continues propping up the vitamins counter over at Arcadia! Whew, close one!

So clearly they will weather the storm, with those pieces in place. As he trudges to his truck and begins the long drive home, however, his thoughts turn to all the others. Like Ken and Sharon, who’ve so diligently clamored to wrestle his job from him. Congratulations, folks! You got it! Surely all your hopes and dreams will come true now, he thinks, with a wry little smirk.

But really, there’s one argument you could make, which cuts to the quick and strips away all the fat, boiling this issue down to its essence: are they seriously saying that the guy heading up this entire operation, Todd freaking Cashner, is a more essential employee than he? Yes, quite clearly, they are saying that, as today’s dismissal demonstrates. That being the case, this ship deserves to sink. This ship deserves to sink.