Chapter Fifteen

It was nearly three weeks before I heard back from Jerry. I know it was a natural occurrence and it had nothing to do with my interpersonal relationships, but it was as if the earth was picking up on my discomfort of the situation. While the autumn had been cool, in a crisp, snappy sort of way, it had gotten even colder to the point where it was no longer comfortable. I began to dread having to go outside in the early morning to drive to the flagship location and see whatever nonsense my clients had cooked up for me that day.

I should have let him say what he had to say to me in the diner, was the phrase I kept chastising myself with over and over. Well, it’s too late now.

The long drought of Jerry’s company made the long hours at the Fresh Face Co-Op feel even longer than they had before. It’s not as if I were unable to concentrate. I was never the sort of person to get distracted. However, if I were the sort of person to get distracted, I would have not been able to concentrate.

“We need to start compiling a list,” I announced to the managers. “I’ve noticed that a lot of the employees prioritize getting a paycheck for putting in minimal effort over advancement. That has to stop. Those employees are completely expendable.”

“What are you asking us to do?” Benny asked.

“You need to start looking at who would be cut from your department,” I announced. “Then, depending on the performance of your department. We’re going to have to start letting people go.”

“But we’re already understaffed,” the manager of the deli whined.

“I want to fire Sara!” Jaime announced, her voice straining with the excitement of firing her best employee.

“What? No, I…” I began to stammer in response to Jaime’s announcement. “We’ll talk later, Jaime. It’s too early to say what we’ll do for certain; I want to give everyone a chance first, but I think we need to start drawing up new evaluation sheets and individually assess each employee to see if they fit the necessary criteria.”

Dora’s usually blank, glassy stare looked a little frightened.

“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’ll be there with you to help along the way.”

In response, Dora simply gave me a dreamy smile. Her eyes half closed and her dimples deeply pocking her cheeks, she leaned back in her chair and played with her billowy skirt for a bit.

“Wait a minute,” said Charles. “I’m not sure I like all this. Just how much of a role will you be playing? It just kind of seems like another example of you trying to step in and completely take over without any input from anyone else! What’s to stop you from sacking every single one of my employees and leaving me high and dry?”

I did not let it show on my face, but the Fresh Face Co-Op’s union standards and regulations made Charles’ question literally the stupidest one I had ever heard in my life.

“Charles, I assure you that you will be present for every step of this process,” I said. “There will be full transparency as everything goes down. Don’t worry, you will not come in to work one day to find your staff gone.”

“Oh, so you’re going to heap all this extra work on us? Is that it?” Charles not so much asked as barked. “Force us to sack all the employees we’ve hand-picked and gotten to care about? Make us accountable for their suffering?”

Oh Charles… I’m pretty sure he didn’t even like any of his employees. He was always yelling at them anyway and every time he yelled at them, he explicitly told them “I don’t like you” in those exact words. But he was never the sort of person to pass up the opportunity to complain and so there we were.

“It’s just an additional round of evaluations,” I announced. “We will be holding brief meetings…”

I added emphasis on the word “brief” and looked meaningfully at Jaime. She had a penchant for announcing superfluous meetings. In the short time I had been there, she had already called no less than twenty meetings that she required all the employees on the front end to attend. They would often go on for almost two hours and would consist primarily of “team building” exercises that she had invented herself and long, meandering speeches that didn’t seem to go anywhere.

“For the sake of transparency, we owe it to them to give them a broad idea of what our observations will include and also let them know the gravity of the situation,” I said. “You can all even put it on me if they react poorly to it. I don’t care, but I have a feeling that once they get the idea that we’re taking the initiative to change the culture of the work ethic around here, a lot more will be on board than you would initially suspect.”

For whatever reason, Debbie had insisted on being present at this meeting for managers. When she sat there, she had her mouth pursed so that it was puckered so tightly, it looked like a cat’s booty hole. (I apologize for the imagery.)

“I really don’t feel as if we should be making decisions like this until Cassie gets back,” she said.

I turned to her.

“And just when will Cassie be getting back?” I asked. “Have we pinned down a solid date for that?”

“She’ll be in by Monday,” said Debbie with all the self-assurance in the world.

“Great!” I said. “Then she’ll be here just in time to see the initial stages of the plan being implemented.”

Debbie wilted like the farty-smelling flower she was.

“But what if she doesn’t get back in time?” Debbie asked. “Besides, you couldn’t possibly ask her to be a part of this right away. She needs time to recharge.”

My mouth warped into what I could only assume was a pitiful attempt at a smile. A grimace was fighting my brain to take over my face.

“I thought the nearly month and a half of vacation she took was her time to recharge,” I said.

The collective gasp that came from all the managers nearly sucked all the air out of the room which would explain the silence that immediately followed; we were currently inhabiting a vacuum.

“Cassie has not been ‘recharging’, Ron,” Debbie finally said.

The acid in her tone could have melted steel. Every consonant was over enunciated like an angry patron at a family restraint giving their order to a waiter they dislike. It had been like: “I would like a beef bri-sket (!) open faced sandwich and I would like it promptly and served at a hot temperature!”

“She has had a family emergency,” Debbie explained. “That’s why she’s been caught down there for longer than she initially anticipated.”

Oh yes, the so-called “family emergency”. Apparently a second cousin or a great aunt had passed away, keeping Cassie in the Caribbean for another week or so or whatever… it wasn’t really clear for how much longer Cassie’s presence would be required.

I might have been inclined to believe this. Okay, I would have probably been skeptical, but, in my line of work, it is generally best to behave as if you’re giving the client the benefit of the doubt. Had I not checked in with Sara, I might have spoken with more reverence. I did, however, speak with Sara regarding the situation. She was slowly turning into my little flying monkey. Turns out, whenever Cassie went on vacation, some sort of family emergency occurred.

When I first learned of this quirk of Cassie’s vacation taking habits, I was infinitely stressed out. There was no telling how long it would be before I would be able to interact with the enigmatic general manager of the Fresh Face Co-Op. With each passing day, the oppressive urgency was pressing down on me. I barely had enough time to whip this place into shape as it was.

But when I started to think about it, my brain’s inherent need to warp the situation into something optimistic even when faced with the direst of catastrophes took hold. How many times had I been encumbered by the meddling of an inept head manager in the past? The answer was nearly every single job I ever had since signing on to the consulting agency.

Though I had never met the woman, I had been gathering pieces of the puzzle bit by bit from what I heard from her subordinates and seeing how her business operated. Although some of the pieces remained to fill in the whole picture, I was at the point where it was pretty clear; Cassie was a shiitake mushroom manager.

It would have been helpful to have an initial consultation with her, but it was ultimately better that she wouldn’t be around before I began to implement major changes. After all, I was the highest authority without her around as I had been hired by the vote of the owners after they had seen the dismal returns they’d be receiving in the year end reports. All these people had to defer to me whether they liked it or not. That was the approach I took in that particular meeting.

“It’s probably for the best that we’re dealing with this now, in that case,” I said. “That way, Cassie won’t be faced with the difficult task of helping me oversee the plan.”

“But if she’s not assisting in helping you oversee the plan, who will?” Charles asked.

It never failed Charles was on the side of the person who wasn’t present for the conversation. This wasn’t because he liked to defend the person who wasn’t capable of defending themselves, but because it allowed him to be more antagonistic to the person he was speaking to in that exact moment. Had the tables been turned, I’m certain he would have yelled at Cassie for my sake. Such was the nonsensical world of Charles.

I took comfort in that; at least he was consistent then. For that reason, I could more easily predict the intentions and motivations of both him and Dora.

Benny was a little bit more of a blank slate at this point. I had him pegged as generally friendly, but something deep inside was warning me that he would turn on me if I implemented too many strategies that would in any way affect his easy-going lifestyle. Benny Duncan did not concern himself with the overall profitability of the store and he was really only bothered by customer dissatisfaction if the customer was standing right in front of him and yelling or doing anything to harsh his buzz. The deli manger was the same, only he would be a little bit easier to work around because of his criminal background, lack of impulse control and overall stupidity.

I hated to say it, but if the manager of the deli proved to be too troublesome, I could very easily catch him doing something illegal and fire him, citing his criminal background. Even one of the many health code violations would be enough of a justification to get him out of there. If he had one iota of clarity of thought, he would see that. Jaime and Debbie, however, would actively work against me. I could tell. Jaime out of petty self-interest and Debbie, for whatever reason, had a bizarre devotion to Cassie. Something personal had gone down between those two that was too personal for anyone to talk about. Even Sara came up with a blank when I asked her what the deal was there.

“They’re close,” was all Sara could offer me. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Debbie took the vacation with Cassie, except she needs Debbie to be in control of things.”

“But Debbie’s in accounting…” I commented.

Sara shrugged at this.

“Can you imagine a better person to have on your side if you wanted to get away with the kind of stuff Cassie’s inevitably getting away with?” Sara asked.

I did not want to acknowledge this was true to Sara’s face, but looking at Debbie during the meeting we had, I knew she was more than likely right about this. Debbie had the face of a twenty-foot wall, but the eyes of snake poised to attack: nobody was getting in and only venom would come out. She was the most dangerous entity I was to contend with. Unlike the others, there was a sense of guile about her. I proceeded with caution.

“You will all be working alongside me for this entire process,” I announced. “We need to maintain the general vision of the Fresh Face Co-Op while making it a more effective business entity. After all, the bottom line is that the owners aren’t very happy with our annual profit margins. That’s why I was hired. Changes need to be made, but not by changing the things that brought them to purchase a share in the company in the first place.”

Based on my initial read of the room, nearly everybody looked on board with this, except for Debbie. Sure, Charles looked a little suspicious and Benny was cautiously optimistic, but the muscular tension in their faces had released. This was a surer sign of unspoken approval than smiles. It was something that I had learned over the course of doing my job for the past couple of years.

“Well,” I said, brightly. “That’s all I had to say for today. Starting Monday, we’ll start scheduling brief, informative meetings for all the employees for them to take in ten-minute increments during the slow hours of their shifts.”

Jaime frowned at this. Typically, she liked to schedule people to come in outside of their shifts, so they could attend her meetings. There was no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks I was going to force the lowest level employees to come in for an hour that paid less than the amount they had to pay for the gas to drive themselves there. The shift managers would simply have to make sure that the skeleton crew didn’t leave their posts for the ten minutes their coworkers were in the meetings.

“If there are no more questions, I will leave the rest of you to return to your day,” I said, trying to practice what I preached. “If any of you have any questions about the strategy later, you can come to me about them at any time.”

All the top employees of the Fresh Face Co-Op filed out of the meeting room slowly because they were all hesitant to actually go back to doing their jobs.