Small, crowded aisles glimpsed via arial view

“I don’t know what’s got into Corey,” Johnny grouses to Edgar, a rare cloudy sentiment coming from him. “I think that new promotion’s gone straight to his head!”

Edgar doesn’t agree or anything, only laughs and offers the expected, “really?” Even though he has entertained the same thought himself. This seems the most obvious explanation, regarding his own frequent and baffling run-ins with Palmyra’s former store manager here of late. But upon further consideration, Edgar doesn’t really think this is it. The signs were always there. This is exactly who Corey has been from day one — it’s just that he believes he has now reached a level where he no longer has to pretend otherwise.

This has easily been the most tumultuous two week stretch since Edgar has joined the company. It would be more difficult to reconstruct, too, considering there’s precious little time to sit still and just think ever, except that there’s a cause and effect to almost all of it. Impossible to predict in advance, yet with one step leading inexorably to the next, just the same.

Edgar traces a lot of this, actually, to his revelation about the absurdity of driving an hour each way just to field your emails all day. That and these debates about the mileage rate, which he still can’t seem to receive a definitive answer on, even as everyone else continues to turn in those inflated numbers. Well, everyone except Vince Brancatto, that is. Vince says it’s more profitable for him to itemize the miles on his taxes, so he turns nothing in. As he’s the only person doing so, and it seems highly…incongruous that this figure would be the lone homeowner on top of this tax saving strategy, Edgar isn’t quite sure whether to believe the guy. But who knows, it’s possible.

Concerning his own situation, though, Edgar’s not only currently just renting right now, but he is also one of the few employees who drives a lot from store to store, and does so at an hourly rate. Virtually everyone else who does so is salaried. He is also one of the few people who is basically working an office job all day. In fact the only two people who fit into this same category are Valerie and Barbara, and even they rarely venture to the other stores, certainly not multiple ones in the same day.

So his particular situation, as if the job itself didn’t already make it so, is basically unique to the entire company. As such, these concepts are hermetically sealed together, for him if nobody else. The HR lady, Doris, has added an additional complication, too, by pointing out that hourly employees are supposed to clock out before making such a drive.

Which allegedly has insurance ramifications, and so on, and so forth, but makes no sense whatsoever on a practical level. Palmyra is 25 miles from Southside, a distance that all of them know by heart. However, anybody making this drive during daylight hours had better set aside and plan on it taking an hour. Therefore, an hourly employee who is off the clock during this journey would be losing quite a bit of money for his efforts. Either that, or he would have to extend his day by nearly an hour in the afternoon to make up for driving off the clock.

This is without even addressing the pissy tit-for-tat about what everyone else is getting paid for their mileage, which he avoids because it feels incredibly petty. Nonetheless, it remains an indisputable fact that if anyone else were living where he is, and driving to, say, the Palmyra store, they would apparently be getting paid substantially more, up to and including the president’s wife. And while he’s sure that if Corey caught wind of this and piped up with his totally unnecessary two cents, that he would pull some comment out of his ass about, well, yes, I know that’s what the handbook says, but it’s only different for someone in your exact situation, and the reason for that is blah blah blah…But the handbook doesn’t differentiate any of this. As such, as far as Edgar can see, here are his options:

a) tell everyone, Duane and Rob included, that he is never driving to any of the other stores

b) start some kind of spiteful holy war busting everyone else out, which he’s certain would bring all of them down to his mileage rate, not raise him up to theirs, and create a ton of animosity

c) continue losing money on the drives and working later on the multiple-store days, while turning nothing in on the days he drives directly to another store and remains there

d) get creative, by figuring out what seems fair and reasonable to him

There are other factors to consider, too, meaning that the last of these is the only one that really makes sense, as far as he can see. The entire situation agitates him, it’s true, especially most of all the freaking HR lady, who is quick to mete out the punishments and the haughty, disapproving glares, yet acts like he’s some kind of suspicious troublemaker now that he actually needs something, for the first time in his years working here. But most of these considerations, weighing his ultimate decision, are job related.

He’s already stuffing all the invoices, his clipboard, and any other needed paperwork into his laptop bag, whenever headed to another store. Walnut’s been open for almost a year now, and during this time he’s unfailingly clocked in remotely from that coffee shop, dealt with his emails, and then popped over there. Yet it occurs to him now that so long as there’s an internet connection, he could basically do most of his job from anywhere. Charming or not, there’s nothing particularly special about that coffee shop. He’s got access to the shared drive, and can remote into his own PC at Southside if needed, as well as anywhere else that he normally connects to via VNC.

This has the additional bonus that there are tremendously fewer distractions, and therefore he’s able to get a lot more accomplished. It isn’t just the freakouts, about things like the internet, that have absolutely nothing to do with him. The new items madness has steadily spun farther and farther out of control, for example. More and more people are getting into the habit of waiting until he’s in the store, and then bringing baskets if not entire shopping carts of product over to where he is, offering up a lame joke and a crooked smile as they ever so apologetically ask if he can just get the info from these items himself, and add them to the system. Or not even that much — this is Vince’s standard operating procedure, as he will not be caught dead using the new items spreadsheet. Occasionally Edgar protests, but, considering Doris’s edict about never confronting anyone in person ever again, he’s exceedingly cautious about doing so. Also considers that, annoying or not, flying in the face of the ideal, most efficient procedure or not, if you break down this moment to what is best for the store right now, with the item in hand that does not scan at the register, then he’s probably better off just adding the damn thing. Even if it means letting a bunch of technophobic crybabies off the hook yet again.

Once this lightbulb flickers to life, it’s immediately apparent that this will be the way, moving forward, with Palmyra, Liberty, and eventually Arcadia too. He can totally skirt this by staking out a quaint coffee shop near each of these stores, and pull off exactly what he’s done at Walnut all along.

Yeah, well, this lasts exactly once as far as Palmyra Coffee is concerned. It’s a fine experience and all, chilling out in this dim enclave on a cool, cloudy fall morning, enjoying a much better dark roast than he would otherwise and volleying his emails free of interference. The only issue is, it occurs to him, this is also completely unnecessary, a step he can dispense with altogether — by doing all these things before he even leaves the house.

This becomes the new normal for him. If he’s working at another store, he clocks in and handles all his emails before leaving the house. Will drive there on the clock, but will not turn in any mileage. In the absence of straight answers or for that matter any that make the tiniest bit of sense, this is what he’s pieced together. It feels reasonable, and fair. He’s far more productive at home anyway, and, as expected, nobody seems to even notice, as he doesn’t hear a word from anyone on this topic.

All is going swimmingly for a couple of months, that is, until a paradoxical half day where this strategy comes unraveled. After all this time doing so on full, eight hour days, it makes total HSM-style, up-is-down type sense that this shortened shift proves problematic, and has various individuals losing their shit. One where he had already submitted and scheduled four hours of PTO time, because this year was running out of weeks for using these and he was also in the process of moving, and planned on just working from home for the remaining four hours on this uneventful Wednesday. Thursday morning he is in Palmyra and Corey, though only still just the store manager here and not even actually his superior, calls Edgar into his office.

“What store were you at yesterday?”

Edgar shrugs and says, “I wasn’t at any of the stores yesterday.”

“That’s what I thought. Vince called me to complain that you were clocked in at his store, but he hadn’t seen you.”

“Vince called you?” Edgar replies, genuinely baffled by this development. Although he can certainly believe that this bizarro curiosity would be the one thing Vince might choose to focus on for an entire day. “Why would he care? My hours don’t even get charged to a store, they go to the accounting department. I always just clock in wherever and then clock out…”

Corey waves a hand to cut him off and says, “that doesn’t matter. Some of the other employees are complaining, too.”

This, on the other hand, smells like bullshit. Corey very much has the air of a detective who just discovered a key piece of evidence five minutes ago, yet has convinced himself he knew it all along and is therefore some kind of masterful investigator. There’s no way a bunch of other employees have been yipping at him for days about Edgar working from home, and he only just now finally decided to say something.

“The other employees?”

“Yeah, they’re saying it’s not fair for you to get to work from home.”

“What? Why would they care? You can’t even do every job from home. You can’t, like, stock vitamins from your house. I mean, I actually get more accomplished there, because there aren’t as many distractions.”

“That’s you saying this. How do I know you’re not just screwing around?”

“We’ve had people working at the store who were just screwing around, and nobody knew it,” Edgar points out, shrugging one shoulder again.

The two of them have remained standing, on opposite sides of Corey’s desk, for the entirety of this conversation. Thus it is all the easier to see that Palmyra’s store manager doesn’t much care for this comment, true though it might be. So Edgar pivots, adding, “I was already only working a half day yesterday, because I had to wait on the cable guy. There’s no reason to drive down here, work four hours, and drive back home. One day it took me six hours to go through all my emails! I can do that from anywhere. I can also process these invoices from anywhere. I can add new items from anywhere.”

“Yeah, well, we can’t be having this. This needs to stop.”

Left by this roadside during this discussion is whether Corey is even in a position to bark orders at Edgar, though he doesn’t think of this until later. Corey certainly thinks he is, but this means nothing. They could all stand some clarity about the hierarchy around this place. Once, when he was new on the job, thinking that because he works out of Southside and therefore she would need to know, he asked Destiny about scheduling a vacation day, and she pointed out that he doesn’t answer to her, that he would need to ask Duane. Despite whatever chest thumping and bloated self-importance is coming into play around here, it doesn’t change that those two, Destiny and Corey, work the same job, and the same would apply to both.

This exchange is also interesting in that it points to the modern industry maxim don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness. Because companies are far more obsessed with what things look like instead of what they are. Your bosses will commonly shoot down a request like this, to work from home for example, out of hand and sight unseen, without even knowing what they are disagreeing to, or that what you’re asking is beneficial to the company. All because what this request looks like makes them uneasy.

And he wasn’t even about to get into the whole mileage kerfuffle, which would take volumes at this point. That is also definitely none of Corey’s business, either, the more he thinks about it. The most salient development to stem from all of this, however, is that it becomes the equivalent of someone flicking a snowball, which swiftly gains mass and velocity from this moment forward, as it carries their relationship careening at a sharp trajectory downhill.

Within days, it becomes obvious that countless other elements are swirling around in this murky backwater, too. Though Edgar has asked Harry at least four times now if he is needed at Arcadia, the guy heading up that operation keeps telling him no. He insists that only a select few are permitted inside the place, because others will just get in the way, and that he will let Edgar know when the timing is right. One morning, Corey even stops in at Southside for some reason, to “see what was going on,” before driving over to Arcadia himself, where Duane, Harry and for whatever reason Vince already are, and Edgar mentions this to him.

“I keep asking Harry if there’s anything I should be doing over there, but he says no, he’ll tell me when. I’ve mentioned this I think four times.”

“Really?” Corey replies, with an amused half smirk and a half nod, though leaving with nothing else said.

It’s a Monday afternoon deep into the holiday season, when all these disparate pieces snap together, in an unbelievably straight line and with stunning exactitude. For months now, they’ve steadily ordered a ton of product for Arcadia, yet kept it in a storage facility offsite, until the necessary permits are secured. Now Harry says he’s gotten everything lined up, and they can begin bringing product into the building. Still, nobody has announced an actual opening date for the store, and Edgar still hasn’t been notified by Harry or anyone else that his presence is permitted inside this building. Indeed he, like just about everybody, will only hear of these explosive developments days later.

They’ve gotten pallets parked into just about every available space at Arcadia when yet another inspector shows up, says that they are mistaken, they are not quite cleared to occupy this ground. Therefore, they have no choice but to load all the product back on the company box truck, make untold return trips with it to the storage facility, and wait around some more. This is apparently the moment where Duane begins to realize that Harry is not the man for spearheading this operation.

It’s a bit surprising he ever handed over the keys to this, really. Duane has the experience himself and could surely have pulled it off. Maybe it was a show of faith or maybe he’s caught some flak for the handling of two different Walnut openings, who can really say. What is increasingly obvious is that despite Harry’s years in the industry and the bluster about his experience, his contacts, all the hot deals he’s lined up for this Arcadia opening, he has botched this entire project from start to finish. He hasn’t really consulted anyone else and, while some would say he just kind of lost his head in the spotlights, cracked under pressure, got caught up in a rush, whatever, others remark that no, this performance more closely resembles someone who has never done this before.

Back at the office, Duane fires off an email to the entire company, announcing that Corey has just been promoted to his second-in-command. No mention is made of Harry, or that there was even any kind of candidate reviewing process, probably because none ever existed. Corey is now heading up the Arcadia opening, so let’s all give him a warm round of applause, et cetera et cetera.

Yeah, so this is an email. In response, however, sometime that evening and composed from what must have been a home computer — therefore, long after this point has any relevance, refuting this whole “tech illiterate” vibe he’s projected all along — Harry dashes off, again to the entire company, what has become known as The Email. To Edgar’s recollection, this is only the fourth inbox message he’s ever received from Harry…and the other three, he was merely forwarding something that a vendor had sent him, either a pricing list or a catalog.

Corey: Congratulations on your Promotion. I really mean that. You have Definitely Earned it!! But as someone who has been around EVEN longer, I felt that I should Point Out what you are in store for. Know that you will be working some Very Long hours without any thanks or gratitude. That People will be coming at you from every Direction with requests for your Time. That you will have Many Different bosses to Try and keep Happy. And that it is a very Demanding position overall, which Nobody will appreciate and Many might often Criticize. But Congratulations Corey. Wow, that is really Something. That is Great. I Really Mean it. Good Luck with your Great New Job. I’m Sure there is absolutely Nobody Else in the Company who could do as Good a Job as You.

By the time Edgar arrives at Southside, eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, the buzz about this email has already begun, soon to intensify into that of a plague-level swarm. He’s only reading it for the first time and is somewhere in the middle of this development. His first thought is that, aside from the zany capitalization choices, he’s actually fairly impressed with the grammatical flow overall. It’s much better than he would have expected from the old chap. Right after that comes the consideration that Harry probably isn’t even that far off the mark, by insinuating that Corey won’t exactly hit it out of the park in this role. But yeah, most of all, it’s hard to miss that this message is dripping sarcasm, and is pretty freaking hilarious as a result. He laughs out loud while rereading this, just as Dale is walking past his door.

“What’s that?” Dale asks, grinning broadly as he sticks his head in, clearly just about certain that he already knows the answer.

“Have you seen this?” Edgar says, turning toward him while gesturing over at his screen.

“Is that The Email from Harry?”

“Yes.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve seen it. Everyone has seen it.”

“This is hilarious!”

“Yeah, I don’t know what he was thinking,” Dale declares, shaking his head as he walks away.

And nobody else does, either, least of all Duane. Within hours, word begins to circulate, from multiple reliable sources, about the scene that went down over at Arcadia this morning. Harry had shown up over there, a little on the late side, to start with, and possibly dreading the fallout from his questionable communique. Duane, Corey, Vince and a slew of the soon-to-be Arcadia staff, having finally gotten the genuine go ahead to begin loading the shelves, were furiously doing so. Harry steps inside the building, and encounters Duane near the entrance, as their intrepid president is busy unloading a pallet.

“What are you doing!?” Duane snaps, and, as he makes a shooing motion toward the automatic front doors, adds, “we don’t need you here.”

This much is agreed upon, although endless debate will follow about its ramifications. While obviously awkward, and by no means a positive development, as many an armchair quarterback will observe, Duane technically never said that Harry was fired. However, Harry appears to have interpreted it as such. For he not only turns around and leaves this store, he never returns to Southside or any other, either, at least not while gainfully employed for the Healthy Shopper Market. By the time an ally or two, such as Craig, and possibly somebody else, learns of this and reaches out to Harry, it’s basically already too late. Leaving just enough ambiguity that anyone wishing to claim that he was fired or that he quit still has plenty of evidence to support this view.

And yet, this is but one angle Edgar will subsequently have considerable reason to ponder. Lost in the shuffle somewhat is that Duane himself may have hastily snapped to a decision — not that he was wrong in doing so — by firing off the preceding email, appointing Corey to vice president. Edgar only believes this because they have yet to name anyone as his successor, to run Palmyra. For that matter they haven’t even posted the store manager vacancy, even though it’s their second busiest store at well over $100K a week.

The second observation concerns what kind of chaos can ensue, from the quitting/firing of one not-exactly-all-star employee, without a backup plan already in motion. A thoroughly average worker could realistically take months to replace, to the extent that you can argue a warm body clocking in at the 40th or even 35th percentile might as well be kept around. The HSM now demonstrates this concept in the wild, by papering over their holes with Vince in the bulk/produce and now grocery merchandiser role, Craig promoted as Southside’s assistant store manager, and Brian appointed to an interim store manager role at Palmyra. Although in so doing, even assuming all three of these guys can cut it in their improvised, emergency posts, you’ve still got hurricane winds blowing through the gaps, in the form of one grocery manager and one assistant store manager missing.

Other thoughts will only later occur to Edgar, even though these are the ones which directly apply to him. Like the little sidebar in this breathless reporting about the Duane-Harry showdown, that Arcadia’s future employees have all been granted access to the building. Yet nobody has given him the green light? Maybe it’s difficult for anyone to maintain complete objectivity, maybe they’re all inclined toward self-importance, but…it sure seems like someone should have invited him to the party by this point. He did after all have a solid month on hand even at the original Walnut cubbyhole. Nobody has named an opening date for Arcadia yet, but the general perception is that it will happen much sooner than a month from now.

Answers eventually arrive on this front, at 3pm, Wednesday afternoon. Although this is even more mystifying, in just about any way a person could possibly name. It’s a simple, one line email from Corey: be here beginning tomorrow morning, to get the store ready for Saturday’s opening. Pretty straightforward, yes, about as unambiguous as it gets, though no less baffling for it.