Do internet outages affect The Cloud as much as a desktop app? That's the real question.

Of course, though Edgar is physically in the Palmyra store on average about twice per month now, and Marla surely no more than the same, the next time he shows his face in that building, naturally she is here all day as well. He wouldn’t say she’s going out of her way to be extra annoying, not without any definitive proof — and with her default setting not leaving much wiggle room for expansion in that direction anyway — but it sure seems like a pinch of this is possibly in the recipe for today.

Upon discovering that he’s bunkered down in the break room with his own projects, she continually besieges him with hers. The requests for the wacky report combinations will not stop, until she’s once again all but basically demanding, why can I not just mentally picture various items around the store, and have those all telepathically show up in one report? Huh? What is wrong with you? Why can’t you make this happen?

He’s kind of wondering how much more of this he can stomach without losing his mind, before a different solution occurs to him. Admittedly, he should have maybe thought of this sooner, but then again he wouldn’t suggest this to anybody else working here, either. It’s something he has done personally and that’s about it. Plus it seems pretty obvious that this will make life a little bit easier for her, and the interactions between them less antagonistic, but that he’s most likely just setting himself up for still more work. But, if it makes her a tad more pleasant to deal with, then the tradeoff might be worthwhile. This is when he tells her to open up an Excel sheet on her tablet, and then extracts from his laptop bag that simple, plug-and-play USB powered scanner, the one that doesn’t even require an internet connection.

“Okay, so, you can just go along with this, and scan anything you want to see in a report. It’ll just drop the barcode in there, like this,” he demonstrates with an outdated package sitting across the table, “and then, just email me the file. I can get you a report with all of these items in it. But, I do need this back, because it’s the only one we have.”

Without barely a word said, and definitely not one of thanks, she snatches the gadget out of his hand, shooting him a dirty glance as though he’s intentionally withheld crucial information from her all this time. Then stomps out of the room and gets to work. And while, sure, she is bombarding him with files, from here unto eternity, at least he doesn’t have to see much more of her on this day, until she returns at the end of the shift to hand back this scanner.

He has mentioned acquiring more of these puppies, stretching clear back to the Duane days, in meetings, or conversations and emails to Felix, continuing forward to this Todd/Fred/Don era. But again, it’s like no one ever seems to know what he’s talking about, even when elaborating why this would be a good idea, and they couldn’t possibly cost that much. Is he going to pay for these out of his own pocket? Or go ahead and fire off an order, then attempt to secure reimbursement? That’s not really feasible, particularly as there’s no guarantee this would work and that anyone would use them anyway.

But, while possibly somewhat coincidental, somewhat clearly inspired by this development, there are positive ramifications. The first occurs when Marla makes Todd buy her one of these simple barcode scanners. The second is where, just possibly beginning to grasp how preposterous some of this report running mayhem has gotten, Todd proudly announces this bold new development from RU Data: a website for viewing movement reports. No longer will a person have to pull up the desktop application — he or she can simply visit rudatacloud.com/wholesomeshoppermarket instead for all of his/her colorful pie chart, bar graph, and line by line report needs.

It’s a cool development, to be sure. Still, outside of a handful of office people who probably didn’t install the desktop application — Todd, Fred, the merchandisers — and an even smaller few at the stores, as in managers who have their own dedicated desks (Don, Destiny, Russell, uh…maybe that Shane guy up Lorena?) there’s really nobody else who didn’t already have handy access whose life is made tremendously easier by this. The same ones who were balking at pulling their own movement reports would surely continue to do so now. Yet if Todd is convinced this is revolutionary, then that alone would presumably gain his backing, if Edgar would ever challenge anybody in the future on running their own movement reports. At least as far as he’s concerned, this will probably wind up as the greatest takeaway from this latest addition.

“This way anybody who didn’t have access before, now they’ve got access,” Todd tells Edgar, standing in his doorway as he breaks this news.

“Well, I mean, everybody already had access,” Edgar clarifies from his desk, “whether or not they actually learned how to use the program…”

“Yeah but I’m not talking about the desktop app. These reports are in the cloud now. This way there’s no excuses. See, people are a lot more likely to pull up reports in the cloud, instead of some computer program.”

“I hope you’re right,” Edgar says, though thinking that, among other things, Shelly and the others in Palmyra were recently fighting him on that very point, as though he were belligerent and preposterous for suggesting they pull up a browser to access Outlook, “I mean, Slingshot was all online, too, and we still had half the people not wanting to…”

Todd waves him off and insists, “yeah, but this is the cloud. This isn’t just some website, okay?”

“Uh….”

“Yeah, so just make sure you set up everyone that needs it. Make sure Marla’s got access, too.”

“Okay, cool…,” he says, nodding as he considers the potential pluses of that addition, along with maybe some others, “oh, so wait, does this mean those emails I send out with the sales breakdown every morning, that I wouldn’t have to…”

“Keep sending those, too,” Todd cuts him off yet again, “and adding it to the shared drive. This way we have everything, and it’s all right there.”

On balance, this probably is a little better. Even if its greatest utility proves, like so many other concepts, a perception and an ammunition related one, rather than whether anybody is actually more likely to use this thing. Also, though Edgar’s not exactly surprised by this development, it turns out that RU Data is just dumping their item movement alone into this website, with little other info. For whatever reason, the coder assigned to knocking out this particular project didn’t add any of the internal structuring on these numbers, as far as departments and sub-departments, from the program to the cloud. And there’s also no capability, currently, for going down a level lower into the categories, which means another likely series of hissy fits once Marla catches wind of this.

These points he determines by emailing Todd, who forwards it to that Glen guy at RU Data, who in turn confirms all of them. Edgar is told that they “may add” the ability to drill down into a category in the future, however. In the meantime, Glen says Edgar will have to recreate all of the departments and sub-departments in the cloud, then upload files mapping what goes where.

Fortunately, after creating those designations, earmarking what goes where is a simple matter of uploading a spreadsheet with their entire database. All told it’s not too horrible, although he would assume this means any changes would have to be done here in the cloud, but then also in the RU Data central program, as well as, for as long as this convoluted structure persists, in Slingshot, too, as he has all along. As a side note, he’s also kind of wondering whether, regardless if a sales rep is someone’s wife or not, it’s really a standard business practice to give outside employees access to your database. But if Todd says to add Marla, then he’s doing so — and who knows, it may just keep her a smidgen more off of his and Sharon’s backs.

Given all this, Edgar can’t resist a little sarcasm in the blanket email he sends out to everyone. In his corner is also the fact that he’s not aware of anyone picking up on and definitely no one taking issue with the sarcasm. After all, Todd considers these points to be valid ones, and Edgar can totally picture him nodding along as he reads this:

Greetings all. Hey, I wanted to let you know about an exciting new development: we now have the ability to access movement reports from RU Data Cloud. Back in the Slingshot days, reports were just online; now, they are in The Cloud! So this should obviously be a lot better.

Anyway, everyone has access to this website. It’s at rudatacloud.com/wholesomeshoppermarket. I just went ahead and gave everyone the initial password of Wholesome123, although you will want to change that as soon as possible. If you need any help learning how to use that site, just let me know. Moving forward, Todd does expect that everyone will be using it to run their own sales reports. Thanks!

It soon occurs to him, however, that although this initial setup was not too horrific, he will not only have to upload any department changes to the RU Data Cloud, but new items as well. The former is really not all that common, the other is a daily process. In nearly ten years still not a single day has passed without someone sending new items to be added. So this is a much bigger deal. Edgar goes from thinking to, “eh, it’s not that big of a hassle,” for the first few days of this, to tapping out and asking this Glen guy if they can’t possibly fix this piece. Considering that Glen is just the random coder who was assigned to this project, and that he obviously didn’t know how to do so, he says it’s possible, but he’ll have to reach out to the other coders to see if they have done this for other clients. In other words, expect to wait bare minimum at least a few weeks.

This is how coping, and coming up with clever workarounds, and just knuckling down without complaint eventually turns into an unmanageable mess. But at the same time, management doesn’t really want to hear you bellyache, either, certainly not about their pet projects that they have invested so much into. Aside from the fact that they would have no idea what you’re talking about, anyway.

You would almost have to enter the office banging on a marching band drum and yodeling about everything you’ve got on your plate, every day, for anyone to get it. Even that is debatable — but if nothing else, they would presumably not forget that you’re blathering on about something. He has mentioned some of these convoluted processes to Todd and Fred, but they just effectively blink and shrug and look at Edgar like, “what’s your point?” He’s also beginning to suspect that, again highly correlated with Todd’s refusal to admit that RU Data sucks in any fashion, any issues Edgar points out are having a negative effect on Edgar and Edgar only, because it just feeds into and fuels Todd’s belief that he’s not getting such a “highly advanced” program. And therefore if he does mention any of this, he is also screwing himself. Either road taken is bad news.

But yes, okay, in what Todd apparently must consider primitive times, though by any measure most passive observers would agree this only makes sense, for years upon years now, they have just had to upload the spreadsheets one time, and these would deploy everywhere. Now, though it just rolls off the tongue for Edgar to say that the work involved with this process — and most other updates — has been doubled, this is actually an understatement. He’s deploying the majority of their files three and sometimes four separate places now.

Owing to Todd’s pronouncement that Slingshot was “dead” and his insistence upon canceling their service contract, it remains true that the severed connection from HQ-Palmyra persists, as neither Edgar, Felix, nor Teri know how to fix that, and Todd refuses to pay for the service call. This has meant that Edgar continues connecting remotely into Palmyra and uploading the files there, for Slingshot, then manually forcing a sync with HQ. So that workaround continues to function — blessedly — but this has only put him back to the metaphorical square one, regarding the other two stores, because the info won’t automatically send out to them in this manner, unless waiting for the overnight sync. Hence, a second deployment, sending this info out from HQ to Central and Arcadia. Another upload to the RU Data mainframe, after logging remotely into their server, which sends down to the Hupp cash registers. And now a final upload, for new items and any department related changes, to the RU Data Cloud.

Nonetheless, and despite talk from two of the bosses that he needs to “delegate” more, the third boss is meanwhile under the impression that Edgar tiptoes through a field of sunflowers all day. This becomes all the more obvious when he receives his latest email from Marla. For once she is not the least bit belligerent, but rather dispassionately relating this latest twist, what she has been told to do. According to her, as she has copied Don Evans and her own boss at Universal Foods, Roberta, on this email, Don has instructed her to personally email Edgar scanned paper copies of the Universal invoices from now on, so that he can flip through those and look for new items. Per Don, this is the new item procedure now. Attached to this email is a PDF containing such, just one recent grocery order, to the tune of 30 scanned pages.

Edgar, Don has informed me that we are to scan all invoices over to you now and you will search through these for any new items. This is the new method moving forward. Is this all you need? Please let me know if there is more.

To say that this madness fires him up is an understatement. Not that anybody would necessarily know it to look at him, because on the surface he strives to remain as calm as can be. But it’s definitely possible that he hasn’t found himself this agitated since the day Corey pretty much declared that the botched Arcadia opening was Edgar’s fault and he was splitting his job in half with Pierre freaking O’Brien. Yet, one consideration in favor of remaining tranquil is that he suspects this is part of what bugs Don about him, that he keeps trying to get under Edgar’s skin and it never visibly appears to work. Edgar continues to shoot down his absurd takes on things, and smoothly continues right on down the road. Why give the guy any satisfaction?

Marla: Okay, this is actually the first I am hearing about this. For the record I think this is a lot more work and a huge step backwards from what we have been doing. But it sounds like this has already been decided. I will start going through these invoices. Thanks for sending.

They could actually use somebody marching through the front door of this office right now, banging on a giant drum. For any reason whatsoever. It occurs to Edgar that nothing funny has happened around here in a long, long time. The point of work is to work, obviously, but they at least used to have a tight knit crew with some great camaraderie. Focus has never been a problem for him, regardless of the situation, to the extent that those who don’t really know him around here often consider him humorless. While it remains an extremely bizarre place to work, it used to be downright hilarious.

About the only source of comedy for months now has been Dale going around saying, “killing it!” to everything, usually as a parting shot, as he shakes his head and walks away. Sometimes stylized as #KillingIt for added comedic effect, like during one of their most recent conversations.

“So let me ask you this,” Dale says, dipping into Edgar’s office a few days earlier, “how are we gonna place orders at the new store?”

“That’s a very good question,” Edgar admits with a grin.

“Do you think RU Data is gonna be set up for ordering by the time Lorena opens?”

“At this rate? No. I would be extremely surprised if that happened.”

“Really? So what are we gonna do? Every time I try to ask Todd, he either changes the subject, or tells me not to worry about it.”

“Well, they’re not gonna have Slingshot up there, but at the same time, RU Data hasn’t made any progress that I’ve seen on setting up ordering. I mean some of the EDI vendors should theoretically be set up soon, but not before opening. As far as all the rest of the vendors, I couldn’t tell you what the holdup is. Glen and Matt don’t even answer my emails on that topic.”

“So then how do we place orders?”

“Well, MRI at least has those proprietary guns, which is what they’re using in Palmyra. Beyond that…I guess we go back to emailing and calling everyone?”

At this, Dale shakes his head, announces, “hashtag killing it!” and walks out of the room.

As Edgar types up this email to Marla and the others, he doesn’t have this specific conversation in his head. Nonetheless, that highly trending catchphrase is upon his lips, is stuck in his brain throughout. Muttering, “hashtag killing it,” to himself, he hits the Send button and waits for this next atom bomb to detonate.