Sections 10–16 of the Southside beer empire

Prior to that day that Valerie slipped him a beer, Edgar had only tried drinking here on one other occasion. He’s trying his best to take this job seriously, plus this is just not something that people generally do in a normal office setting, and anyway he is surrounded by people, basically has no time to come up for air and consider such a prospect regardless. As such, despite often being surrounded by bottles of wine pretty much every single day, either due to Pierre’s earlier insanity, or the occasional free sample from his brother’s girlfriend Melanie, he’s never again attempted any funny business on that score.

But there was one afternoon, it must have been a year earlier, when he was stuck at his desk all day. It was already 4:15, so a quarter of an hour past his usual leaving time, with still more work ahead. And yet, he hadn’t seen anyone else up here on the second floor whatsoever — no kind of event underway that he was aware of, and they certainly weren’t out of town for a trade show, it was just a fluke slow midweek day where the merchandisers all happened to be somewhere else, and Duane as well.

His eyes settle on a bottle of merlot that Melanie had recently given him. This remains a very awkward dynamic, here on the job, and in reality, they don’t interact here much. He saves any questions for whenever they might meet socially, and she almost never drifts up to his office unless needing something. It’s one of those things that sound cool, but is extremely uncomfortable to pull off — although he suspects figures such as Corey, Destiny and/or Jake wouldn’t experience many qualms about such.

If there’s absolutely nobody here important whatsoever, he has stuffed a free sample into his laptop bag right before exiting the building. He just doesn’t feel like answering a ton of questions or deflect suspicious eyeballs or, even worse, somehow get terminated over this nonsense. On still other hilarious occasions, he’s just gone ahead and split the difference by secretly donating the bottle to the store. But on this afternoon, having seen nobody of substance all day, he just figures what the hell, and decides to open this puppy right here.

Healthy Shopper Market already has about as murky a policy on this stuff as possible. It’s definitely one of those situations where if you reach a certain level, then whatever you say on the subject is automatically correct, and everybody else below you who says otherwise is wrong. Destiny technically has nothing to do with beer and wine any longer, but if there’s alcohol being demoed anywhere within these walls, as the reps often do in somebody’s office, then she is certainly going to be in the mix “sampling” the stuff for “approval.” The same applies to Corey and Jake, and Pierre — though uninterested in the beer — when it comes to wine, even though they admittedly have much more active roles. Not to mention that, by bringing back Chef Mike, the company has all but signed off on drinking on the job. For yanking a sixer off the shelf and pounding it behind the deli counter, he was basically rewarded with a two month vacation, followed by a huge promotion.

So Edgar grabs the bottle, stuffs it into the bottom drawer of his desk, which is tall enough so that it will stand upright. Locates a wine opener over in the merchandisers’ office, then returns over here. This longer side of his L shaped desk faces the door anyway, so he can keep his eyes attuned to any development whatsoever, with the community room dark but its back entrance visible even from here.

Except he has no sooner unwrapped the bottle and opened it, set a disposable coffee cup in the bottom and filled it to the rim, before he hears Duane’s voice, coming up the ramp to the community room’s front entrance. He’s talking to some other guy, a potential future supplier, and the two of them breeze right on past Edgar’s door, as Duane unlocks the next one over and he enters. Neither so much as looked his way, and wouldn’t have seen anything if they did, apart from his paralyzed, surely deer in headlights facial expression. Figuring that to dump this out would be even riskier, he caps the cup. So yes he will be drinking this.

Moving forward, though, he corks the bottle and later figures out a way to slowly dump the rest, via a series of moves, cup by cup in the employee bathroom. Then chucks the empty bottle in the bottom of his trashcan, before tying the bag and taking it out to the dumpster. Even so, the paranoia is mounting as this is a clear trash bag, and he basically expects to be busted out now any moment.

Yeah, he didn’t really think that one through too well. That had been about a year ago, and he hadn’t attempted anything like it since, considering Duane’s freak emergence as a clear, blinking sign not to. The basic tiebreaker with that scenario now, on the rare occasions that Melanie gives him a freebie, is that if it’s already in the system, he donates it to the store, if not then he finds a way to take it home in his laptop bag.

Tonight, though, things might be different. This is rapidly shaping up as an unprecedented, if not completely unpredictable, set of circumstances. Somehow it’s already mid-November, wow, and on top of that not just the holidays, but this opening over at Arcadia that’s fast approaching. Tomorrow is a Saturday and they have a huge store event coming up at Southside now, which is fairly standard, although for some reason Duane has asked him to be on hand for this one.

Apart from one occasion about a year and a half ago, he hasn’t worked any Saturdays. Back then, following the only time he’s called in sick so far, he decided he needed to make up the hours, on account of some pressing work, rather than turn in a personal day. Therefore drove down here to South, just that one Saturday, which was admittedly a little more peaceful than the standard weekday, nearly alone up there in the offices. Still, he’s hoping this doesn’t turn into the new norm, giving up a Saturday for a Wednesday every time they have some event at one of the stores. Particularly as his presence should never be required.

The reason they want him here this time is due to what Edgar thinks of as last minute freakouts. He knows this is something that starts with various disorganized department managers and merchandisers, reaching a fever pitch as it’s passed up to store managers who in turn ask Duane to make this happen. The day of the events, people are stumbling across new items that nobody ever sent him, which they’d planned as centerpieces for their Customer Appreciation or Holiday Tasting displays. Probably with a hot promotional price, too, which as a result was never entered. Not only that, but signs remaining up for sales that had in fact already expired.

This last point is one that seriously rankles him. This isn’t to say that he never forgot anything in the entire history of working here, but he still maintains that he is way more organized than probably anyone else at this place. You could count on one hand the times he forgot to deploy a file — and if it was his mistake, he would just log in remotely from home and fix it anyway. Another factor as to why this isn’t that common is that the daily new item files and the sales batches typically involve numerous different stores and departments, and if something’s wrong or missing, he would have almost always have heard about it from at least one person. More often than not, assuming someone didn’t just forget to send him an item, the leading cause of why it “isn’t working” is that a person who insisted upon typing something by hand, instead of copying and pasting, either omitted or miskeyed a single digit in the UPC — which has the same effect as not sending an item at all. It’s not going to scan.

But these sales signs remaining up past the point that the promotion has ended are a nuisance on many levels, one of his top pet peeves. This is because the Orchestra program doesn’t have any sale sign function, so the employees are whipping these up themselves. And even though he has been in a habit of signing off every email related to this topic with the byline, so you’ll probably want to make a note of this, and put the ending date on your signs, almost nobody does this.

The reason they don’t wish to do so — unless considering possibly pure laziness — is they are well aware that, knowing this place, the sale is going to eventually be extended anyway. It happens all the time. Instead of taking the signs down, they’d rather just leave them up and play dumb for a few days, until someone complains to Edgar that the sale “isn’t working.” This is rarely if ever a problem with the vitamins department, as Dale plans out their sales in advance, everyone knows the dates, which almost always run the same full month as their sales flyers anyhow. Otherwise, he’s running into this situation repeatedly, although it doesn’t happen nearly as much in bulk, produce, deli or alcohol, is really only an epidemic in grocery, and even then just certain notorious characters.

“Well it probably ended, right?” he usually says, in the middle of clicking through a few screens to reach that tab in Orchestra.

“I don’t know. It just isn’t working,” is the standard reply.

Even though this has an unbeaten track record of being 100% the cause for this scenario, that the sale has ended, and the most obvious answer from a common sense standpoint, not to mention — if he really wanted to be a dick about it — something they probably should have investigated themselves in the email chain first before calling him, these repeat offenders always act like that possibility never occurred to them, but they frankly consider it mighty far-fetched that this would be the culprit.

There’s never been a single documented case where this wasn’t the cause. One reason for this is that you can’t alter the sale batches, therefore they aren’t going to just stop working in the middle. You would have to actively go in and delete the entire thing, and start over, that’s the only way to change something. This hasn’t happened, and while theoretically he could have entered the wrong end date, to date this blessedly hasn’t happened, either. But in the wake of this find, what typically happens is that, after a two or three day pause, during which the signs were left up, customers were probably complaining and cashiers were forced to rebate the difference repeatedly, after someone got around to notifying Harry who finally got around to notifying Edgar — as he certainly isn’t going to make this call on his own — then the promotional price is reinstated, for another random series of weeks, which certainly nobody is going to create brand new signs for (why would they? They already have some up! Sweet!) or even hand-write the ending date on, and therefore this entire chain reaction is likely to repeat.

So while this is pitched as having him on hand so they can be more “organized” at tomorrow’s event, what it really means is the complete opposite. They are playing into the chaos, they are capitulating to the chaos. Encouraging the chaos, signing off on the chaos, because now you have someone here to hold your hands six days a week, as you tiptoe through this field of daisies! How awesome is that!?

Which brings them to the present tense. It isn’t that he expects to have a ton of legitimate work tomorrow, has already somewhat committed to doing the bare minimum, for a change, if they’re going to force him to hang out here for this event. There’s always various b.s. busywork type stuff to be done, which feels like screwing off and wasting time during a normal workday, but which technically needs handled at some point — deleting emails, clearing out the downloads folder, et cetera, and this is what he intends to preoccupy himself with, being on-call and waiting around in anticipation of the inevitable last minute freakouts. Or so he tells himself, anyway. In truth he will probably become bored with this somewhere around the time that he fully awakens, like around coffee cup #3, otherwise known as 10am, and will begin tackling something more substantial. For the second time now, for example, Tracy from Bellwether just met with him, and they spent two days going over every single bulk item, to see what kind of prices Rob might be willing to match, on items they’re ordering from elsewhere. He’s already gotten the vendor and item number switches entered, plans on rolling out those tags on Monday, but might look at the sales history and the margins to see if they need to change any retails, too. It makes sense to bundle these together, if possible.

And now there’s this bizarre Friday afternoon, swiftly becoming a surreal Friday evening. For once the potential predicted “winter mix” that everyone was losing their minds over, this actually hit, and in a substantial way, shortly after 3pm. Basically this amounts to a sleet storm that, if glanced at from the right angle, kind of resembles snow. But it’s icy, and it sticks. Out on the floor researching various invoice items, Edgar’s watching this fall with a fury, and thinks that he might just stick this out for an extra hour. Let the highways flush out most of the commuters, who surely left work early themselves, to get a head start on their behind-the-wheel meltdowns. This region was good for one but only one snowstorm per winter, just enough to remind him that people down here do not know how to drive in adverse conditions. Last year’s edition meant that it took him an all- time record of two hours to make it home, as opposed to the standard one, and he’s not really looking forward to repeating that experience, especially considering he must return here at 8am-ish tomorrow anyway.

It’s not until around 5pm that other ideas begin formulating in his head. The winter mix hasn’t relented an iota, meaning that to look at the clock now and think about logistics becomes sillier by the minute. By this point it has already long since occurred to him that putting in nine hours today meant he could probably sneak out after just seven tomorrow. A ten hour day means a six hour one tomorrow, and if working eleven or twelve tonight…

But wait a second, what about not going home at all? Thankfully, the internet has held up until this point — not a given with this company in the least bit — and he’s been able to continue plowing through various online related projects without interruption. This also means he’s able to check the weather forecast. The local experts all seem to believe that this sludge should melt by about eight or nine in the morning, but then again that’s not the issue. Barring a total catastrophe, they’re not canceling the event, and he doubts he’d experiencing any trouble driving back down. The point is that he’s finding less and less justification for slogging clear up there at this hour.

As it just so happens, not that she’s the only one, but in drifting past his office, Valerie sticks her head in and expresses surprise to find him still here. Darts in to sit lightly on the edge of his patient chair — a move that, he’s come to recognize, indicates someone just passing through, as opposed to flopping into it for a longer session — and asks him what the deal is. They joke around for a second about the misery involved with giving up their Saturday for this event tomorrow, and then he realizes that, as she’s surely found herself stuck here at closing time on multiple occasions, she might be able to answer some practical questions he’s been wondering about.

“What’s the situation here at closing time? Do they have, like, motion detectors in this place, that go off after hours?”

“Pssh. Please. This place? No. Why, what’s up?”

Instead of directly answering, though, he nods, rocking in his own somewhat springy chair, and asks, “so what does the closing manager do, then? They rustle everyone up and, then, like, inspect the entire building or whatever?”

Valerie grins and says, “depends on who it is. Destiny at least says peace out, lock the doors, shut off the lights, what the fuck ever. Vince doesn’t say shit, he just wanders out the front door and leaves. The deli people are here late as fuck anyway, half the time, they might be the last ones to leave. So in other words…not so much. But what’s this about, anyway?”

He calculates for a second or two whether to tell her, before realizing that she might be able to point out potential snags with his master plan here. “Well, don’t tell anyone, but…I’m thinking about just crashing here tonight.”

At this, her ghost of a grin reanimates, broadens into a fully formed smile. “Really? Are you serious? That’s pretty fuckin funny,” she says, before leaving his office.