the sitch
Well I already posted yesterday about my bike ride from the Bothell PCC store to the Baily U-Pick Farm, which I wound up doing on my own when nobody else showed up, so I don't have a huge amount otherwise to update you on.
Except! I do have a bit of an update on that mystery now that I'm back at work today, and Melissa, the organizer of the monthly bike rides, came over to apologize over and over again, to the point I told her she really didn't have to keep apologizing. I still had fun! And in an effort to make her feel better, I told her in email that since she was the one who told me about the ride and I never would have done it without her, it could be credibly argued that it's still because of her that I had a good day yesterday. Or a good morning, at least: I was off on the bike ride by 9 a.m. and home by 12:34. It really was basically just a morning thing. The rest of the day wasn't bad at all either, but it was the morning that was the real highlight.
It's because of things like this that it's such a great thing that I enjoy my own company. Lots of people have issues going out to do things by themselves, and if that's the only option they won't do it: from going out to eat to going to the movies to, perhaps in fewer yet still plenty of cases, going on bike rides. Certainly in cases like this where there was the expectation of a bike ride to which no one else shows. I think most other people in my situation would have just packed up and gone back home. Me, I didn't want to waste the trip. Or the sunscreen.
Anyway, here are the things I learned from Melissa this morning.
First of all, no one showed up besides Melissa herself for the June ride. The July ride was canceled for basically the same reason: no apparent interest. According to Melissa, she emailed both the other organizers of the rides at the office, and store directors at the Bothell store, that the ride was off for both that reason and that she had to take her niece to a Harry Styles concert the night before and didn't think she could get up early for a ride the next morning. (I could have, but whatever.)
The thing is, I had emailed her about my potential interest in the July and August rides when she first sent the email out to dozens of staff members she knew to be regular cyclists, on the 1st of June. She even replied, "Thanks for signing up!" But, five weeks went by and she apparently forgot about that -- until the middle of this past weekend, when she did think of it: Oh, SHIT -- Matthew! But, she had no way of getting a hold of me. Or so she thought: she could have found me on Facebook; she could even have emailed me to my work email address, which I even checked yesterday morning, as I have it in my email app on my phone. I won't fault her for not thinking of these things, though. Lots of people wouldn't.
I think there's a fair chance the August ride will still go forward, and it won't even be just me that time. That's a 9-mile ride from the Redmond store to Oxbow Farm. Claudia already told me she would commit to the August ride, and it sounds to me like Melissa will likely do that one as well.
I'm still a little baffled by no one at the Bothell store knowing anything about it -- except, I suppose, if the Store Directors were told it was canceled, I guess they expected no one to show up, so they saw no reason to mention it to other staff. As Melissa said, though, these posters are up at all the stores. You'd think someone would know about it. Melissa said there has been so little interest she has come close to telling all the stores just to pull down the posters -- I'm glad she still hasn't done that. Still, with all the cycling enthusiast staff we have, particularly company-wide, it stuns me there hasn't been more interest. As in, no one aside from Melissa showed up in June; no one besides me showed up in July. Hopefully the August one will pan out, for the three of us including Claudia, at the very least.
Melissa follows me on Instagram using an account for her dog. So here's another upside to this whole exchange: I'll now finally remember her name for good. She talked to me many months ago about being the dog account that follows me on Instagram. I even mentioned it again while talking to her not long ago in the staff kitchen: "You're the one with the dog account on Instagram, right?" I didn't ask her to remind me her name, though. Now I know -- and will remember -- it's Melissa. Unlike far too many others around here anymore, I know have the information and have retained it: her name, her title, what she does. I fully know who she is now!
The most notable thing to happen over the weekend otherwise was just a walk to Volunteer Park and back with Shobhit Saturday evening. We had spent the whole day watching movies or TV and I was getting cabin fever and just wanted to get out. This was just a walk, not running any kind of errands, so . . . Social Review point for Shobhit! That, as always, made him happy.
We had to walk much slower than usual, though. Shobhit typically gets the super-early shift starting at 7 a.m. on Wednesdays so he can help unload the truck on product delivery day. I guess he dropped a ping pong table on his toe a few weeks ago, and his toe hasn't stopped aching, so he finally went to see a doctor about it after work on Friday. It was not a clean break but a hairline fracture. They gave him a special brace to wear in place of a shoe and told him not to put too much pressure on it. So, he took the walk with that thing on, and walked slowly.
We stopped at Caffe Ladro along the way, to use my 2-for-1 drinks Chinook Book coupon. I had my hot chai drank by the time we were halfway through strolling through Volunteer Park. I got texts from Gabriel while we were in the park, asking what I was doing that evening. I guess he had a fleeting thought of wanting company the first night he spent alone in his new apartment, but then he said he should deal: "I'll be a big boy." I actually did invite him over, after Shobhit said he could cook something light to feed him. This is significant, as they haven't been in the same room together since they totally blew up at each other at my Birth Week party in early May 2017. I have been kind of deliberately socializing with Gabriel in ways that keep Shobhit out of it for nearly all of that time, and God knows, the two of them actively avoided each other for several months after that. To my surprise, this makes it Shobhit who offered the first olive branch, 14 months later. Gabriel has had some specific troubles of late that Shobhit has been hardcore on Gabriel's side about, actually. I haven't even told Gabriel that, really.
I still called Gabriel on FaceTime when we got home and talked to him for a little while. And I got to see his new apartment that way. It's rather nice, actually. Not Salmon Beach, of course, but what could possibly stack up to that? I'm glad I got to visit there several times before he had to move out. I hoped to get there one last time recently but that just wasn't in the cards.
In other news, I keep forgetting to mention the email sent out at work by our CEO last week, announcing the new CFO, the guy now replacing Randy, who recently retired after working here a record 41 years. Those are very big shoes to fill. What fascinates me about this guy is multi-fold: he's of Indian descent and used to work for Microsoft, just like Shobhit (and, okay, like a ton of other people too -- lots of Indian people have and continue to work for Microsoft). More specifically, though, that's where his career began, and, according to the email, he "helped build out a strategy for their India operations." I assume that means he had an impact on the job Shobhit used to do there, as a Program Manager who constantly had conference calls with staff who worked in India.
He was also once the CFO for the team that launched Amazon India, and was CFO for Amazon Japan. So he's got notable histories with both Microsoft and Amazon. Cate, herself, came from Starbucks. These things have made many customers balk at the supposed "corporatization" of PCC, but I think those people have it backwards: it's more like the co-op-ization of former corporate executives. I liked this detail about the new guy: he and his wife became co-op members and regular PCC shoppers in 1997. Unlike, say, our current Executive Assistant, this guy has a long history with PCC as a customer. Last I heard, the Executive Assistant has yet to visit a single one of our stores. In her defense, though, being a customer at the stores is hardly all that necessary for her specific job, and doesn't necessarily give her greater insight into what she has to do. (It probably would still help on some level, but whatever. If she's good at the job, she's good at the job.) It's much easier to see how that would be helpful for someone in a position like CFO -- especially considering the legacy of the man he's replacing.
[posted 12:15 pm]