One of the stranger aspects about Todd’s remarks, apart from the fact that they had nothing to do with the topics at hand, is that Slingshot is nowhere near dead. Much as they might wish it were. But no, Edgar is still required to continue doing everything in both databases, because Matt can’t figure out how to get ordering to work with RU Data. Well, the EDI part he has presumably solved, but the problem is that those are still up in the air from a connection standpoint — not just Universal Foods, but all 12 other vendors as well, telling him this would take weeks to fully enable.
In the meantime, though, there is this matter of the other 95% or so, the ones they’re shooting off the PDFs to via email. This should theoretically be far easier, but Matt can’t seem to solve this, period. Either that or he hasn’t worked on it at all. Because apart from recently asking Edgar to give him one example, they have seen no progress on this topic. Figuring that Bellwether Snacks was not only one of their largest of the so called “email order” vendors, but that they were the easiest to determine success/failure with — because within 5 minutes, tops, Tracy could let him know if she received the invoice or not — this is the one he told Matt to try, and sent him the information for doing so. That was two weeks ago, though. It did not work that day, and Matt hasn’t made any headway since.
This isn’t the only reason they’ve been forced to keep Slingshot up and running, however. There is also this matter of Todd expecting Edgar to download and patch in daily reports, stretching back to the beginning of that program, whenever he has some “free time.” If receiving definitive word that they were shutting Slingshot down, then yeah, he would just go in there with a fury, download every report one day at a time, and worry about filling in that file on the shared drive whenever time did permit. As it stands, though, he’s focused more on going week by week, as those occasional semi-spare moments do present themselves, and has thus far knocked off about four months in that fashion.
Then there is the matter of the shelf tags. Felix has to configure those brand new HSX printers, for whatever reason, on the server down at Bellwether. He hasn’t exactly tackled such, as work has already shifted to setting up wiring and internet and so forth at the Lorena store instead. So for now they are in this holding pattern which presents one of two options. If absolutely requiring the brand new shelf tag styles, then someone can email a file to Edgar, and he can print them off in his office. Otherwise, considering he is forced to upload every file to Slingshot still anyway — again, for ordering purposes, people need to have new items, discontinued items, and costs updated, so it makes sense just to habitually add every file to Slingshot and RU Data both — then they are mostly just printing out the old style themselves at the stores, as they have been all along.
But at least after this whole “delegation” conversation, Edgar feels like he has maybe some implied backing to get more forceful, with some of his own points he’s been trying to push and/or mulling over for eons. Even if most of this trouble, and by far the largest inefficiency muddling up his days, isn’t a matter of “delegating” his actual tasks to (non-existent) underlings, it’s the continual confusion of who does what for this company. And the tendency that the bosses and other employees seemingly have, when unsure about these concepts, to just assume that they fall into his lap.
This problem is seemingly moving in the wrong direction, too, and accelerating as it does so. Because it’s becoming pretty obvious that management and staff alike must conduct extensive conversations when he’s not around, and are in agreement that he sucks. He first begins to realize how serious this is becoming on the latest Wednesday morning, where he arrives at work to discover that the weekly sales batch apparently failed to deploy. Not only that, but that Shelly has sent out the following email to all three bosses, the merchandisers, and every department manager at Palmyra. And to him, too, of course:
Hey just a heads up but it appears that Edgar must have forgotten to add the sale batch for this week. As of 7:30 this morning none of them are ringing at the sale price. Some of the items aren’t even in the system. But yeah, just thought you should know. Thanks.
Okay, his first order of business, as panic immediately sends his pulse racing, most noticeably in an insistent throb on the side of his neck, is to double check the sale file itself. Nothing looks awry, here, however, and yet as he remotely connects into Palmyra, he can see that Shelly’s correct on this much, the sale prices aren’t showing. This immediately leads to the next thought, however, which is: if there were something wrong with his file, then it would fail at all three stores, not just this one. Yet he hasn’t heard anything from Arcadia or Central, which indicates — and indeed, he double checks to confirm that this is true — the sale batch activated correctly at those stores.
Once this is confirmed, he attempts sending the file down to Palmyra again, manually, but it will not activate there. His next move, then, after replying to everyone on Shelly’s email, to let them know that, no, he did not forget to add the sale batch, it just isn’t working at their store, but he is looking into it, is to email RU Data and Hupp both, to see if they can determine what failed and where with this data transfer.
As he awaits their responses, though, there’s a ton to unpack with such a relatively confined issue. Not the least of these is how much is said in Shelly’s short email, and the bosses’ response to it. One of the first things that strikes him is that this is a way bolder angle than she ever would have taken in the past. Without all the facts she nonetheless feels comfortable coming right out and declaring that he screwed up, which he takes it to mean that she has the bosses in her corner. They’re all in agreement now that Edgar sucks, and she knows it.
The second point concerns these items that aren’t ringing. While finger pointing does no good and it really doesn’t matter much anyway, he does mention in his response that if new items aren’t ringing, the most likely explanation is that nobody sent the information to him. Left unsaid is what he often adds whenever this comes up — do they really want to go down this road? Because if he made a mistake or forgot something, he would be the first person to admit it. And this isn’t to say he never did either of those things in all his time here. It’s just that if they are talking about what is far more likely, then yes, this is the most plausible explanation. They either didn’t realize it was a new item, or forgot to send it to him if they did.
As it turns out, this is precisely the case with all eight of the NIS items they identify this morning, up in Palmyra. However, six of the eight are packaged produce items, which leads to another point that he can’t quite seem to impress upon the new-ish produce manager there, some middle aged hippie lady they hired off the street. For the packaged produce items, there are likely hundreds of different UPCs out there for every one of them. Yes, it’s true we have been carrying six ounce packages of organic raspberries for years. That doesn’t matter. With packaged produce, you basically have no choice but to scan every shipment — even if the packaging looks the same — and make sure it rings. Sorry but that’s just the reality of the situation.
The response of this three headed monster up top is equally instructive. It seems increasingly obvious that they either don’t like Edgar or consider him incompetent, or both. For example, their response to these NIS produce items, not just them, but the two managers up there, and Vince as well, her theoretical “merchandiser.” Any of them could have maybe taken the time to explain this to the produce manager again, since Edgar isn’t making much headway there. Yet they apparently don’t care, don’t believe he knows what he’s talking about, or don’t understand what he’s talking about. It’s just more of this shrugging and mumbling and not exactly bothering to look into things or learn the specifics, but definitely having time to stand around and complain and agree that he is horrible. Also, whether some might consider this paranoid or not, there sure seems to be another dimension with someone like Shelly, where he would swear she is pissed off, more than anything else, when none of this turns out to be Edgar’s fault.
But what about the most pressing crisis at hand, this sales batch? Fred, as is usually the case in matters like these, has nothing to say whatsoever — and this is probably the best response of all. Don, meanwhile, continues to march ahead with his own insistent angle, an attitude along the lines of Edgar is a fuckup, and I’m gonna hold his feet to the fire, right this instant! While Todd holds this unwavering viewpoint that, despite almost never having any specifics himself, that RU Data could not possibly be the problem in any way, so they need to look elsewhere. How this manifests in the latest situation is for Todd to send a terse email saying he is going to reach out to Ken Douglas, to look into this matter and “get to the bottom of things,” and for Don meanwhile to call Edgar, putting their conversation on speaker phone up there in Palmyra’s office, with everyone else of note standing around to listen or chime in.
Don of course wants to know how Edgar wasn’t already aware that this sale batch was going to fail, in sending to Palmyra. His response is that, well, these RU Data guys insist that everything must be sent overnight, and have scheduled that to start at midnight. Is he going to log in remotely from home at 12:01am every week, to assure that it has done so? If this were the first week, you could make a case for that, but this is now their third week. Last week, everything went fine, after Felix switched the server.
Well, harumph, shouldn’t Edgar have realized it first thing this morning, then, Don wants to know? Okay, this is basically the same answer, applied instead to him getting up at 5:30am or something. Unless they want him to start coming in at maybe 6 on Wednesdays? That’s cool and all, but if so, he is leaving at 2pm, just to make this clear. But really what Edgar wants to know, most of all, is whether this represents the best use of everyone’s time up there, standing around in the office listening to this ridiculous call on speaker?
This is one of the problems you are going to run into, having separate systems for the front and the back end. Hupp is not telepathic, so to speak, and has no advance knowledge of files flying in from RU Data, before they arrive. Whereas with an all-in-one program, there are typically ways to see this prior to a batch ever going live. So there is nothing to “check” on Hupp, not in advance. Yet the real ongoing issue is that these alleged industry veterans helming this company cannot seem to distinguish between a pricing coordinator and an IT person. It’s as if they really don’t understand the difference, and maybe the equation should be pinned to bulletin boards everywhere if not added to the signature line of Edgar’s and Felix’s emails:
figuring out why a sale batch isn’t working = data guy’s problem
fixing infrastructure when it’s proven equipment is to blame = IT guy’s problem
Not that this current situation is even necessarily their IT guy’s problem. In fact, Felix insists, once he is roped into the eventual extensive email chain, that he has done everything RU Data has asked of him from a networking or equipment configuration standpoint. Todd’s latest old chum, Ken Douglas, does chime in as well, although it’s heartening for Edgar to see that he agrees — before even looking into the matter — that it doesn’t sound like this would be a problem with the sale file itself, if it deployed correctly at the other stores. And then confirms it once he is given access to both systems, and manages to “get to the bottom” of this situation alongside the Hupp and RU Data gurus.
RU Data now has some Glen dude helping them, in place of Matt Abernathy, and this is probably a good thing. Matt was pleasant and all, presumably knowledgeable enough to do the job in theory, but also extremely chaotic and not exactly displaying a ton of urgency to their requests. As for Hupp, Rick has admitted from the outset he is definitely not a tech wiz, and has been more of a facilitator, a liaison to their actual IT team.
Whatever the case, though, they eventually hammer out a solution together. The initial proposal, which Edgar has suggested, is that they deploy sales files a day early, but keep this under wraps. This way they could at least determine whether something is or isn’t working. Todd instantly shoots this down, however, proclaiming that he didn’t want to give people an extra day’s worth of sale prices for no reason. So RU Data eventually cobbles something together in conjunction with Hupp to where, if a file fails to send properly, it kicks over into this folder on the store in question’s office computer desktop, readily found by anyone who knows where to look. And all they have to do is click a Retry button and will receive immediate confirmation whether it worked or not.
So this is progress, and potentially a huge development. Does it count as “delegation,” maybe, too? It sure sounds like it might! After all this now means that the likes of Shelly and Don can investigate and fix these errors themselves, instead of firing off nasty, unfounded emails or rustling up everyone for silly ass conference calls. Edgar feels like he told them everything he had to say of value on the subject, within about the first two minutes, and yet this ate up his entire Wednesday anyway.
Why they have such a hard time buying that this is equipment/network/infrastructure related, he can’t say. Todd clearly partook of the organic children’s fruit beverage when it comes to RU Data, but still. What Edgar doesn’t get is how this is turning into some company wide witch hunt against him. They are all playing for the same team, after all. Unless maybe Todd secretly knows that he stepped in a royal dog pile with some of his sweeping changes, but isn’t about to become the scapegoat himself. He would rather throw someone else to the wolves instead, anyone at all, before that happens. Edgar doesn’t really buy this, though, because it would imply some sort of organized strategy that Todd quite frankly does not seem capable of. Not only that, but he does indeed appear convinced of his own towering brilliance, of which all these wonderful programs are a major component.
What is clear, though, is that more work must be done, defining for everyone what is and isn’t his job. His first chance for doing so manifests itself the next time he visits Palmyra in person. He has just walked in the door and is cutting through a closed cash register lane when Trudy happens to breeze by in front of him, perpendicular as she moves across the front perimeter aisle. At least until she spots Edgar, stops in her tracks, and corrects course to approach him instead.
“Hey, the internet’s out,” she says.
“The internet?”
“Yeah, it’s been out all morning. In case you wanna take a look at that.”
This is one of those defining moments for him, where it doesn’t really count as snapping per se, because he had already plotted out in advance what he was going to say the next time — and likely, every future time — someone confronts him with this scenario.
“You know that hasn’t ever been my job for one minute that I’ve worked here, right? I mean, you do know that, don’t you?”
Even so, while possibly representing a bold new tactic for him, he’s not exactly astounded that this generates the same old response. As Trudy scrunches up her features, half surprised but also half unsure whether to believe him, and blurts out, “really?”
And this is somebody he has worked beside for almost a decade now. She has been the grocery manager at this store for a good eight years. If management wants a textbook example (well, aside from themselves, that is) in what kind of confusion some of them are up against here at the ol’ WSM, this is it. As is true with so many others, this gaping hole in understanding falls squarely at Trudy’s feet. Sure, it’s really groovy that she’s for the most part pleasant to work with, and all, but still — this shtick can only take you so far. The one where, anytime you’re presented with something you find overwhelming or don’t want to think about or whatever, you throw your hands in the air and say something to the effect of, “nnnh! Ahhh! I don’t know! I’m so confused! I hate technology!” and cackle and walk away, thereby once again avoiding learning anything new. No, that kind of needs to end at this point.
