You have 15 minutes at your disposal. CAO reorder all of grocery, or scribble codes on this section of shelf tags?

It’s hard to say yet if this Jose Dominguez character will cut it as head of Human Resources. At the very least, though, if unlikely to totally crush this role as well as Carol had, on the flipside, he should have no trouble bringing more personality to the table than Unfriendly HR. The actual job-related results out of the gate, however, are not strong. Maybe they can chalk this up to unfamiliarity or getting his feet wet or what have you, although it seems more as though his information is possibly outdated.

Approximately a month into his arrival, the employees are set to renew their insurance plans. For some reason Jose doesn’t want them to scan and email him their applications in PDF form, he insists that they must fax these to his office. The only problem is, for the two days leading up to the cutoff date, it just so happens that the fax machine to his office isn’t working, though Felix is attempting to fix it.

At the eleventh hour, on the final day, a panicked Jose gets the insurance company on the phone with a conference call with any employee who is available and interested. As Jose explains his dilemma, someone suggests that they just fax their applications directly to the insurance company, which their HR director reiterates, asking if this will be okay. The insurance rep approves this, but then also agrees to extend the deadline by a couple of days, until Jose’s fax machine is up and running.

Without a ton of faith in plan B, there, as soon as this call has ended, Edgar faxes his application directly to the insurance company, to the number they’ve provided. And thinks nothing more of it until a few days later, when Unfriendly HR calls him at his office.

“You sent your insurance application directly to the company?”

“Yeah. Uh huh,” he says.

“Why would you do that? We need to have it on file here!”

“Jose told us we could do that. Because his fax machine wasn’t working.”

“Yeah but we need to have a record of this. I mean, I had no way of knowing you did this. How would I know you did this? Now we have no record of what’s going on with your insurance. You still should have sent your application here.”

“Jose didn’t say anything about that. He asked them if we could just fax it directly over there, since his fax machine wasn’t working, and they said that would be fine. So that’s what I did.”

“Well, I guess we have to approve it. But this is not the way we do things!” she concludes, and hangs up.

Apparently, as far as they can determine, he and Vicky were the only two who faxed their applications directly to the insurance folks. Everyone else, including those who were not even on the conference call, twiddled their thumbs and waited for this high stakes fax machine intrigue to resolve itself. And Vicky was also given a thorough chewing out over having done so, by Unfriendly HR. Which is all fine and dandy — Edgar’s stance on this, which he really should have just blurted out, can be summarized as, is my application on file and active? If so, then you can bark all you want, because it is totally irrelevant. Jose is your boss, and he told us to do this. Sorry about your bad day — though he does consider this situation a nice metaphor for the current regime as a whole: we can be as chaotic as we want, but dammit, your responses to the chaos had better be on point!

One day Edgar’s over at Arcadia and notices that a bunch of grocery tags have little lowercase letters written upon them, a through h as far as he can tell, in bright pink pen. Actually, he had noticed some of this during his previous visit, too, yet had forgotten all about it until seeing these again. He does somewhat wonder where this latest burst of weirdness originates, but is otherwise preoccupied with going around hanging some brand new tags he’s just cranked out himself. Until the grocery manager, Walter, happens to stroll past at one point.

“You’re messing up my system,” he tells Edgar — smiling, and pleasant enough, though in the manner of someone asking a neighbor to turn down his stereo.

“Messing up your system?”

“Yeah. I’ve got my tags marked by how well they sell. Like, see, the ones that say a?” he says, placing his finger upon a nearby example, “those are the ones I have to reorder the most. This is how I keep track of that.”

“Why wouldn’t you just run a movement report?”

Walter stands there blinking a couple of times. He’s a middle aged guy with curly, brownish grey hair, huge, thick glasses, and a bushy David Crosby mustache, the combined effect of which makes this sight all the more comical. “We can run movement reports?” he says.

This is another of these situations that is baffling on so many levels that Edgar finds himself too paralyzed to choose. Where to even begin? They’ve had this Slingshot program for over two years now, and Walter, while relatively new to the grocery manager role, has worked here in that department even longer. And this wasn’t his first retail assignment in life, he came here with some experience, therefore this concept of movement reports could not possibly be foreign to him. Had he never thought to ask anyone about this before? Or maybe he did, and Destiny scoffed, said something dismissive like, “good luck with that,” as she rolled her eyes, which does seem a very plausible scenario. Regardless, even if it never occurred to the grocery manager that he could run movement reports, how have none of the combined store and assistant managers (Isabel, Shad, Destiny, Candace, Diane…is that it? Seems like maybe Edgar’s maybe missing one, there) and his grocery merchandiser, Vince, and the three head honchos, not to mention his fellow coworkers, perhaps, collectively ever noticed these pink letters and/or never explained to him once in all this time that he had the ability to do so?

Yet, facing this confounding fork in the road, Edgar instead simply says, “yes. I can show you how, if you want.”

“Mmm…that’s okay. Maybe some other time,” Walter says, and saunters off.

So this is what they’re increasingly dealing with, around here, as a larger and larger percentage of the staff. It isn’t as though Edgar’s going to report Walter to anyone, however — this is a perfect example of someone he’s just tuning out and going around without another thought. Is it his responsibility to straighten this dude out? He feels like his responsibility ended with offering to show Walter how to run reports, which he refused. A guy like this has endless time for scribbling hieroglyphics on all his shelf tags, but can’t be bothered to spend a few minutes learning something new. Whatever. The tags are going to need updated sooner or later, though, my dear pal, whether you like it or not, whether or not it’s messing up your “system.” Those around here who get it, though, are expected to field whatever wackiness anyone is confronting them with, and be good sports about it, but mustn’t dare refuting said wackiness, by explaining the right way. This is where they are crossing the line.

There are rumblings from management that Edgar is “taking too much on” and should offload some of this, which he would be totally fine with — but offload what? These movement reports are a perfect specimen in that they represent about the lowest hanging fruit he can think of. Other than maybe those jar and bin labels for bulk, which he completed over three years ago, and continues to update on the shared drive. In either instance, anyone whatsoever can access both, and print their own. About half will do so, the other half continue to fight it.

Dealing with someone like Vince is even better, in that he not only is considered exempt from modernism due to his old person status, but they are expected to treat him as though he is one of their superiors — even though he’s just a merchandiser, i.e. not the least bit above anyone else in the office. Vince continues to stick his head into Edgar’s office most mornings, and ask for a quick recap on the store numbers, but then also will occasionally email or verbally request that Edgar run him a movement report for specific product lines or departments. The latest request for a pasta brand’s sales history offers an exquisite example of this phenomenon, no less in that Vince’s terse reply, after being sent the sales report, crystallizes in just a few words everything that rubs Edgar raw about dealing with people like this:

there’s no total at the bottom

That’s it. This is the extent of Vince’s response. Which he stews about for a few minutes, contemplates ignoring entirely, before coming up with a compromise of sorts in that he sends an updated one, with a total at the bottom of the column, but without any comment of his own. If anybody would ask him what he really thinks about this topic, though, he can think of at least 7 pertinent points:

1. Despite all this talk about Edgar “delegating” tasks, and his continually mentioning these movement reports as one prime example of something that anyone can do, this person is among the many who are not going to be caught running any reports anytime this century.
2. You didn’t ask for any total at the bottom. You just asked for a movement report on the items.
3. How about some manners?
4. Maybe it’s not “delegating,” but can this person not learn how to do a simple total function at the bottom of an Excel column?
5. Management can harp on him about “delegating,” but the few times he’s tried to draw the line in the sand about running movement reports, or printing off bin labels from the shared drive, that person has gone to management, who in turn have basically told him to stop being a dick and to run the movement reports/print the labels himself.
6. If you’re complaining about something, then you’re not really trying to find solutions. So he mostly just runs the damn reports and moves on, tries to forget about this whole topic. Instead of attacking this person or going to management over this person.

7. But isn’t this actually making matters worse, to continue putting up with points 1–6 above?

Bonus Point, when sending reports to a bunch of people at once: whether you choose to send everyone a file in Excel or PDF, half will complain that they want it in the other format.

They are increasingly overruled by the tyranny of the complainers. This is a problem everywhere, but it’s becoming an epidemic around here. A percentage which suffers another hit when the meatcutter at Central, Joe, is the latest to take his talents elsewhere. Joe, who is basically one of just two decent full-time butchers this company has had in the entire time Edgar’s worked here (the other was Billy, who quickly moved into management), an absolute rock steadying the ship back there for years…and yet this only means he labored away in shadow, taken for granted this entire time. Actually, one gets the feeling that if you mentioned Joe the day after he left, certain bosses would have been tapping their lips with a finger, muttering, “Joe…Joe…?” as they tried to place the name.

But guaranteed, they know who the most vocal whiners are around this company. The problem is, though, that if all you are listening to is the likes of Ralph, Sondra, and Laurie all day, then you are going to have a very warped sense of reality. And yet this is precisely what the rest of them are dealing with here. You can have five people quietly hitting it out of the park, with their noses to the grindstone, but one complainer constantly going to management with his or her beefs, and this will be the viewpoint that most likely takes hold. All the more prevalent in that they are much more likely to bitch to coworkers and for that matter probably customers as well.

It also surely doesn’t help that most bosses brazenly assume they know more about what’s going on than they really do. Another major reason the whiners gain so much traction is that the bosses have to play along and act like they have detailed knowledge of the inner workings on everything, even when they don’t, and therefore lend undue credence to the pissers and moaners. What they should do instead, however, is to think of the most quiet person they can come up with who is also doing a stellar job, and go ask that individual, off the record and without fear of repercussion, what he really thinks about everything. Joe would have been an excellent candidate for that.

Things continue skewing in the wrong direction when, hot on the heels of this defection, Jack is the next to throw in a white flag. In this instance, he somewhat unexpectedly cites Felix as the primary catalyst, the source of his frustrations. He says that behind the scenes Felix is actually quite unpleasant to work for, though it also doesn’t help that Todd has begun talking up a fourth store he wants to open halfway between Chesboro and Waxoff. The amount of driving between locations is already fairly insane, for such a small operation, days where Jack is heading all the way down to the Bellwether HQ, then up to Palmyra, then back down to HQ again, then finally home, halfway in between the two, all at Felix’s or someone else’s insistence. There’s a ton of chaos on top of it, too, regarding the work performed at these destinations, and this theoretical new store would only further complicate matters.

So this royally sucks, for all the obvious reasons, but also because Jack is one of the better friends Edgar has developed in his time with the company. A thought which really hits home one day, when he’s thinking about how the NFL season only recently begun, and there was no talk whatsoever this year of putting together a fantasy league. This is when a truly mortifying realization sinks in: last year at this time, they had a solid nucleus of people who get it, who did a great job and were not complainers. Eight such people signed up for that fantasy football league. Five have since left under their own volition, with only Edgar and the two females remaining, Valerie and Sharon. This too is not a good sign.