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I kind of had the ability to fart around a bit at work yesterday, and now today I'm kind of slammed with a lot of work to do. That's not because I didn't work on any of this stuff yesterday, though; it's specifically because I had to wait even to start on certain tasks until today, because that's just how the deadlines in the systems I use are working. "Price optimization," for example, which is a process of auto-generating promotion retails that will get loaded to the item maintenance system on Monday, has to happen today: the data the system needs to run today's tasks was not loaded, as part of an automated process, until late last night. I spent most of the morning doing that, and even had to run Steven's Health and Body Care department scenarios for him because he's working from home out on Bumfuck Island (Vashon) and has a terrible home internet connection. My connection is great! Anyway, there's the sort of opposite effect of so many June promotions having been canceled due to massive demand for certain products in an age of both panic buying and no one able to eat at restaurants, plus just the fact that for the same reason far fewer than normal ads for June were submitted to begin with. This allowed me to finish the price optimization process in probably half the time it would have taken me if the world were operating normally.

And all of that's not even to mention the back door receiving paperwork I now have to spend the rest of the afternoon working on, which I also could not work on earlier as I can only "approve" invoices in the system one day (or one work day) before I return the paperwork to the office, and it is specifically for these receiver discrepancies that I go stop by the office twice a week, either on Monday or Tuesday and then either on Friday or Saturday. It'll be Saturday this week, as I'll be drinking soon after my work day is over today, as it's Virtual Happy Hour with Laney at 5:30. I hope I get through my entire stack of receivers, as if not, I'll have to do a bit of work on Saturday, which I don't think I've ever done before!

And I keep getting unusual distractions pulling my attention away from getting these tasks done, which is annoying. But, I'm getting it all done with still a fair minimum of stress or hassle, which is good.

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We did just have our office "Town Hall" meeting on Zoom. I decided to log into my work Zoom account no my larger personal iMac desktop just so I wouldn't be looking at all the many rectangle-framed faces on my tiny 14" work laptop screen. My iMac screen must have about twice the surface area.

I took five screenshots while on the call, to capture all the roughly 100 people who were on it. It then took me a fair amount of time to get all the photos properly sent to my phone's iCloud photo stream so I could then post them to social media. It's not really that, so much, that is the reason I am posting this rather later than normal today—it's because I posted those photos to social media and then forgot I still had today's Daily Lunch Update (DLU) to finish up and post! So, here I am.

The Zoom "Town Hall" went really rather well, actually. Everyone but Cate, the CEO and meeting host, was smartly muted, so we wouldn't all have a cacophony of everyone's background noise. I did have a few minutes of embarrassment when I realized I was the only one sitting on video with my bed totally visible behind me. When I saw that Marie was using sunflowers as a virtual background, I realized, oh right—and I turned one on myself: the Golden Gate Bridge. So, even though shortly after I joined the call and Cate said "Matthew you're beautifully backlit" (same complain Sherri had: the sunlight coming in the windows behind me made me a silhouette), probably most other people did not see the bed because within five minutes I had the virtual background on. Also, all of our squares were quite small, as so many of us were on the call.

We did get some somewhat sobering information: I think I've been sort of misled by the massive amount of panic buying sales that made center-store grocery products skyrocket in revenue. Cate noted that we are clearly in a recession, and PCC is "not recession-proof," and there are many ways they are looking ahead and "tightening the belt" as it were. I don't feel any less secure about my job, mind you; it's just that the overall grocery industry, at least for PCC, is not quite as "booming" as I was thinking. We've had to close down all the self-serve Deli departments and the bulk sections, after all, and while these used to account for something like 40% of overall store sales, they're now down to 14%, I think she said. I don't remember the exact number; the point is, the huge increase in dry shelf grocery product sales has been largely balanced out by the plummeting sales in other departments that have long been defining characteristics of our company, and a big reason customers came into stores to begin with. We were told we're "on budget" for April, but going forward there will be, and already have been, decisions being made in light of recession.

Honestly if it gets President Fuckwit out of office it will have all been worth it. Maybe not all the deaths, but certainly the recession. It's practically the only thing that guarantees a president won't be re-elected, no matter how terrible he is. Granted, this is a guy for whom the world somehow refuses to make sure all the regular rules actually apply—particularly other Republicans. I hope beyond hope that a recession on top of a response to the pandemic so botched it cost thousands of lives will combine to conspire against his continued success. I live to see that man, if nothing else, truly demoralized. So far he's just gotten several years of bizarre validation, even though he's objectively a fucking monster.

Anyway! That was the most negative the meeting got, and even that wasn't that negative: just a frank assessment of where we are, which is still in a pretty good position. Plenty of other more positive things were discussed, and Cate was amused when, just as the meeting was about to end, I was one of the few people to text something out to everyone: "So what's for lunch??" I wrote. Because when these happen at the office, we're usually fed lunch. Cate said, "I love you Matthew, I can always count on you for a laugh."

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[posted 1:59 pm]