"Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot" - Chapter 80

The office water cooler sounds like a puking cat. These are the kinds of things one never notices – are maybe impossible to notice – in a more diffuse environment. He can't even think of where the office cooler was located back at Southside, for example. Now that there are nine bodies crammed into this cozy brick office, however, not much is going to escape any of them.

Edgar's wife wonders how he is so good at tuning out distractions, to which he always answers, that if you hope to succeed in an office environment, you pretty much have to be. While nothing like the endless chatter and the buzzing phone lines of that huge second floor down at Bellwether, they do have to contend with thumping music nearly around the clock from the beauty salon directly above them. It's just a two store building, with external metal stairs, four or five units wide. They don't hear anything from the ones directly beside them – and are blessed to occupy an end unit, the one nearest to the strip mall – but these noisy upstairs neighbors more than make up for it.

And then there's the Barbara experience. Edgar wears headphones most days, and it's a fifty-fifty split as to which phenomenon typically leads to this. Fully moved in, with their identical white IKEA desks assembled, there was no other configuration that made sense apart from facing one another, as turning one desk sideways left not enough room for the other to go around. Spaghetti Junction is one reason behind this, eating up a solid chunk of one corner, while wall to wall shelving eats up two other walls. Then there's the empty fish tank with the twigs, taking up most remaining available space. They could have maybe gotten clever with some sort of L shaped pattern, a checkmark, a seven, though this would have meant having desks that physically touched, sitting even closer to one another, in which case he thinks he'd rather just face her.

His first substantial observation regards this crazy “grounding” pad which is supposed to absorb computer energy. She breaks this puppy out pretty much every day. The way she explains it, after plugging this into a standard wall socket, two orange lights means you're good, and can shut this bad boy off for the day, one red light is bad and means you need to leave it running. Which is all well and good, and might even work, who knows, except that she attempts pushing this puppy onto him as well. Much like the foot lady, Barbara is taken aback by and doesn't quite seem to believe Edgar's assertion of, “I pretty much feel awesome all the time,” when he shoots her down.

This and other examples point to what he considers something of a double standard with the hippie lifestyle. On one hand they want to fly off the handle at a moment's notice, blathering trite declarations about not judging them, not telling them how to live, and embracing alternative lifestyles yourself...but then by the same token will turn around and, within 10 or 15 minutes of meeting you, without any evidence whatsoever, will proceed to tell you everything that's wrong with your life.

It's kind of like the day Barbara is thoroughly aghast because Edgar heats up some leftovers in a plastic to-go container. “Don't you know how bad that is for you!” she gasps, adding, “you really shouldn't do that!”

If he were doing so every day for thirty years, okay, she might have a point. However anyone just a smidgen more observant might notice that it's rare he eats lunch of any sort – unless someone else is taking him out and springing for it – and even rarer something microwaved, therefore he believes he will probably survive this episode. Nodding while he forks a mouthful out of his container, seated behind his desk, he shoots her a cool glance that basically asks, are you done yet? though not verbally saying anything.

“Shut up now, Barbara, heh heh,” she laughs on the other side of her own faux wooden work surface, “okay, okay...” and turns her attention back to her computer.

There's also this weird performative routine every day when she takes her vitamins, which he thinks maybe Valerie might have already mentioned to him, a long time ago. That seems to ring a bell. It features the kind of over the top, purposefully exaggerated mannerisms you would expect from someone in a charades game. Or someone starving for attention, perhaps. And then another frequent phenomenon he has begun to think of as erotic tea dunking and makes him wonder if she doesn't have the hots for him or something. This one involves her heating up some water, then sitting at her desk dunking her tea bag into it, repeatedly, at terrific languid leisure, while shooting him these weird come hither type glances.

One day she's trying to send something to the printer, which is located in the main room, near a support beam and on the other side of the water cooler. Barbara is printing things often, so it isn't as though she's a newbie to this phenomenon, but...she eventually asks for Edgar's help (but of course she does – who else would people approach for their equipment related concerns if not the pricing coordinator?) because she keeps getting an error message that the “printer is offline.” She sends the document over to print multiple times, but continually receives this flashing red alert instead. Tasked with solving this riddle, Edgar strolls out there and turns the machine on. At this point her pages begin printing, all of them.

But he tends to take it easy on her. She's pleasant enough for the most part, and also apparently says nice things about him to others. Not that there's a ton of time to ponder any of this, not with so much else going on.

At Liberty and Arcadia, they've determined that business is slow enough that they don't need to hire a receiver. That this person wouldn't have enough to do, and that therefore, pretty much every capable body in the store will combine to handle this task instead. There are pluses and minuses to this approach, though it just barely squeaks by as a positive, Edgar supposes. On one hand it's fairly idealistic to think that you can trust all of them to do a good job, and not to get confused with crossed wires in the form of double entries - or its opposite, believing someone else had checked in a delivery when in fact no one had. On the other, you would at least get a whole slew of people familiar with the receiving process, which could never be a bad thing. And perfection right out of the gate was not the point, anyway, the point was to steadily work themselves toward having a fully accurate inventory. Although even so, even if mostly a positive, he's still not sure why you wouldn't just hire a receiver, and then have that person do something else instead during the down time.

Thankfully nobody has such kooky ideas concerning Palmyra, which is now their busiest store. You could make the argument that they've once again done themselves no favors by failing to post the position, but it doesn't appear that anyone was clamoring for it. Just like they had done at Central – possibly out of fear that someone like Marian would again be straining against her muzzle, declaring herself a perfect match for it – where they evidently believed they had nobody on hand worthwhile, and hiring Pattie from the outside world, this scenario also plays out up there. The only differences are exceedingly finer ones, concerning the timing of various events. Here a former part timer from produce, this British kid named Nigel, just so happened to have recently applied for reentry up in Palmyra. Considering this a perfect coincidence, they effectively shrugged and offered him the job.

So Edgar's first order of business is to train all of them, one day each on hand at the stores, followed by countless emails and phone calls. Thanks to that day of working side by side with Aubrey, their continued back and forth on uploading the product database, and then actually helping check in product himself at the Central office, he has a very good grasp on how all this is supposed to work. But then again, he has to know how all this works – it's the only way to make all of this function properly, the entire sequence from back dock to cash register. Not to toot his own horn, but the did feel as though he grasped it well right out of the gate, because it's not really that confusing. You just need to take good notes concerning the actual processes, as they pertain to this software. The first solid sign that he had a handle on these concepts came that first day in his makeshift Palmyra office, working side by side with Melissa and Aubrey, when he had a suggestion running counter to what Slingshot's own representative was suggesting.

“How do we handle the random weight stuff? As far as having the correct case quantity in the system?” he asks.

“Okay, so with the random weight stuff, what most stores are doing is,” she replies, collects her thoughts a second to explain this, “so let's say a case of chicken breasts is supposed to be around 40 pounds. Sometimes it comes in at 39 pounds, sometimes 41, or whatever, you know. But it should average out to 40 pounds, pretty much. So you can just have that set as your case quantity, and you figure that should average out to be pretty accurate.”

Edgar nods and considers this for a moment, though believing that he already has a better idea. “Okay but couldn't we just set the case size at 1, and then enter how many pounds we received as the quantity? Like let's say...40.2 pounds came in. We have the case quantity as 1, so the receiver says she received 40.2 of them. Would that work? Does the system let you enter decimal points like that, for quantities?”

Aubrey nods and says, “it does. As long as you were consistent about always doing that, you know, that would work, too. It's up to you.”

All random weight items case pack 1 he writes in his notes, and makes sure that everyone's aware of it.

Regarding the actual live deployment of the POS software, the front end stuff on the registers, this too is mostly seamless. Though Melissa and Felix had to set up the servers and the cash registers themselves at Central, this needed to happen anyway, as they were obviously constructing a brand new store from scratch. Otherwise, it's just software sitting on their existing office computers, there's no equipment needed to install apart from connecting these newfangled scan guns to their internet.

Slingshot goes live on a Wednesday morning at all four stores, and there are high fives all around. No major snags are reported at any of the locations. If only the same could be said for the tech team who, directly on the heels of this installation, announce that Melissa is quitting yet again. No reason is given, although Edgar has seen enough to know that she's a bit of a hothead. Everything will be humming along coolly, and then something sets her off and she decides that she's done, with either a person or position. This time he gets the feeling that it's Felix, but doesn't directly ask her. What he's really wondering anyway is if Duane will bring her back for a fourth time, and what job she might hold down then.