Today is Scott's last day. I've actually had two people today already ask if he or I have been with PCC longer—Scott was hired as an Assistant Store Director at the West Seattle store in 2001, so he started the year before I did. He was celebrated for his 20 years at PCC last year, and I'll get mine this August. I don't generally know most of store staff, though, unless they are POS ("Point of Sale") people, so I really didn't get to know him at all until he shifted to the office in 2006. This means I've known him roughly sixteen years. That only registered for the first time to me yesterday.

I sent out the requisite photo retrospective at work this morning. I sent it to the Merchandising alias, and CCed a few more people in other departments I figured would enjoy it. Scott's last name starts with O, so I was kind of proud of my subject line: scott.o.rama

I didn't bother recreating it in its entirety for my blog today, though. I figured the interest here is more specialized than usual, and I'll always have it in my email archives for reference anyway. Instead, for today's post, I have bookended photos from each end of my 16 years working with him, plus one from right in the middle. The above shot, which I also included in the email retrospective, is the first photo I ever took of Scott. December 20, 2006, at one of our then-annual Merchandising Holiday Potlucks. He's slightly blurry, at the far right, minding his own business, eating a pastry. The thing that gets me about that shot is how, after today, there will be one person in that photo still working at PCC: Jeff C, our Beer and Wine Merchandiser. He's the one taking a swig out of a soda.

The guy in between Jeff and Scott was Paul, then our Director of Merchandising. He only lasted two or three years. To Jeff's right is Shauna, who left PCC in 2008 and I am still friends with, although these days I only ever see her during my traditional Birth Week time with her. At the far end of the table is Elin, probably historically the PCC coworker who was most important to me—she trained me when I was hired in 2002, and she was the only person from work who I invited to Shobhit's and my wedding (although several shots in the Scott retrospective featured her, I opted not to mention that there). The others, the line of four people with their backs to the camera, left to right: Kibby, who started only eight months before I did in 2002 but whose time at PCC ended at the beginning of 2020; Stephanie S, Scott's predecessor as Grocery Merchandiser and also both who hired me in 2002 and nearly fired me in 2003 but then loved me by 2004; Jennifer G, who interviewed me with Stephanie and was eventually my boss, also was unhappy with me in 2004 but loved me by 2005; and Joe H, the very longtime staffer—like, thirty years or something—Produce Merchandiser who retired just last month.

Anyway. I was behind the camera. So, after today, the only people who were in that room and are still working for PCC will be Jeff and myself.

This middle photo is from 2014. Scott, Elin, and in the foreground, then-Health and Body Care (HBC) Merchandiser Wendy. Scott still has a copy of this magazine on display at his desk; he even held it up to show us this morning. "My only cover!" he said. He's been quoted in countless other industry publications over the years, but this was the only one in which he was pictured on the cover. The story had to do with PCC's ultimately failed fight to force brands to label products that contain GMOs, and I guess we just won't get into how ridiculous I actually think that is right now.

I can hardly believe 2014 was eight years ago now. It was also eight years after Scott and I met. I did mention in my email under my 10th anniversary photo of him and Elin on either side of me, that I love this picture because not only is it a wonderful shot, but I’m also here with two of the greats, the people who can genuinely credited with most of how my own now-longtime tenure at PCC has been a consistently fantastic working experience. When it comes to Scott, arguably, too much so: no one has ever given me the benefit of the doubt more than he has. Like, he assumes the best of me and my behavior even when I clearly don't deserve it. It will be interesting to see how things are with the new Grocery Merchandiser, once one is hired. I expect, and hope, it will be Noah. As I mentioned to Eric yesterday afternoon, I'll be having to be part of bringing someone up to speed in one way or another: even a new Grocery Merchandiser who isn't Noah (and hopefully that's not the direction we go in), or a new Associate Center Store Merchandiser once Noah's position opens up if he gets promoted.

Speaking of which, I guess it's time for an aside, so I can speak briefly about my annual review with Eric yesterday afternoon, which was almost shockingly generous. I mean, Eric really had nothing negative to say last year either, but he was notably even more positive this year, clearly largely influenced by the feedback he solicited from both Scott and (Senior Category Manager) Beth, whose email replies Eric openly admitted he largely just copied and pasted into the feedback spaces on the review form he'll be sending to HR. He read it all aloud to me, even though he had already also emailed it to me fifteen minutes before our meeting. Case in point:

Matthew is fabulous and wonderful to work with! A true team player, he works quickly and effectively, often dealing with a lot of “random” issues bubbling up through stores, category management, and promotions. Despite these demands often colliding, he always finds a way to move the pile around and make things happen. To top it off, Matthew often does all of this with minimal direct guidance, asks questions when necessary and is honest in assessing and sharing his commitments and priorities. The information he provides is spot on and if he doesn’t know or understand something, he seeks to understand or clarify rather than figure it out himself. Lastly, he has learned to be more independent over the last few years which has proven to be very helpful for the Grocery department.

Eric told me that entire paragraph was largely assembled from the emails from both Scott and Beth. And I have to give Scott some extra props here too, as so many people could be expected to "check out" in their last days at a job, but Scott has not done that at all. He's really gone out of his way to make sure everyone he works with, but especially Noah and I, have everything we need from him before he's gone. He even called at least one meeting with just the three of us a few weeks ago to discuss it. And I don't know when Scott sent that feedback to Eric, but I know Eric started the process about a month ago so it may have been two or three weeks ago, but still, I really appreciate the effort he went to there to talk me up like that. I appreciate whatever part of that came from Beth too, of course, but the key difference is that Scott is on his way out. He could decide he didn't care about this level of effort anymore, but he's stayed on his A game through to the end.

Anyway. To my genuine shock, my overall review yesterday was upgraded from last year's "Meets Expectations" (which I fully expected, and was fine with, this year; it was how I rated myself in my self-evaluation) to "Above Expections." And the only reason why, the only metric that changed from last year to this one, was that my rating for "Focuses on the Customer" went from "Meets Expectations" last year to "Above Expectations" this year. To be fair, as I was telling Shobhit this morning, Eric is in kind of a precarious position here, as even while he was technically my supervisor, my daily work life involving far more direct interaction with Scott and Noah never changed, so Eric had to do a bit more kind of vague guesswork when rating my last year, when he also had far less time working with me himself. He actually said this year that "maybe you deserved" the higher rating in that category too, but I even rated myself as "Meets expectations" there. That said, it's a fair argument to make that, although I don't spend a lot of time with store customers, vendors and brokers are also customers, just of a different sort, and they uniformly think I practically walk on water. Eric even referenced coworkers themselves as "customers" of sorts, so he really just turned the review into a roughly forty-minute love fest. It was almost embarrassing. Almost.

So, out of five metrics, I got two "Meets Expectations" ("Collaborates" and "Demonstrates Kindness," both fair, and the latter one literally cracking me up because, let's face it, I'm still not the most personable person on the planet; it's only once people get to know me that they realize how great I really am) and three "Above Expectations" ("Focuses on the Customer," "Instills Trust," and "Values Diversity"). This one change was what tipped the average from last year's overall "Meets Expectations" to this year's "Above Expectations." Truthfully, I'm not sure it was even necessary. I remember talking to Alexia last year about my review, and she talked about how she herself, as a manager, thinks of one "Above Expectations" as the new baseline, and someone has to go above and beyond that going forward to get another "Above Expectations." I think that's actually a perfectly fair approach, and I truly don't feel I do any better at my job now than I did a year ago. If anything, Eric seemed to think he didn't rate me highly enough last year. But, oh my god, if they knew how much more I could do but just don't bother, maybe they'd change their tune. Or maybe not. I have to say I am quite unusually responsive, responsible and efficient no matter what. Also I often say I have more to do than I have time in which to get it done, which multiple people tell me is a "good problem to have" (not sure I agree with that, honestly; it's a bit too pro-capitalist for my taste), and that actually is also true no matter what.

I just realized I also have a few people to give Social Review points to for yesterday—because we had a virtual party for Scott, between 4 and 5 p.m. I thought about making a cocktail for it but just had a soda instead. The photo below, representing the most recent image I have of Scott, is a screenshot of my Microsoft Teams screen during the meeting/party. I actually shifted back to the office today, just so I could be here on Scott's last day—in fact, he and Noah and Tracy all came in today; we'll be going to a "goodbye dinner" for Scott at 5:00 right after work today. But, yesterday was thus my last day of a month working from home to ride out most of the Omicron wave. Usually at least one or two people on these virtual meetings is calling in from the office, but every person visible in the screenshot below is calling from home. Jeff C was at the office, actually; he's just not currently visible in the screenshot I got.

We got some nice anecdotes about Scott's time with PCC, and I even shared the one Mimi sent to me via email on Wednesday: During his first days on the job, as assistant store director at West Seattle, I was there meeting with him about our customer service standards when the plumbing in the meat department backed up and there were a couple of inches of "gray water" coming up through the floor drains. Scott and I stopped our meeting and helped handle the situation. I think we had a bit of a special connection because of that unexpected beginning.

I read that to everyone on the call. Scott said he was pretty sure that happened on either his first day or his first week. So, to Mimi's point, it was really "during his first days on the job." That would have been July 2001. I was still working for the Seattle Gay Standard then.

The call lasted until nearly 5:00. I shut down my home work station and started gathering my stuff. I then did something insanely boneheaded. There are two "dongles" I have to keep track of, which plug into USB ports on the laptop to wirelessly connect, one to the earpiece for the phone, and one to both the keyboard and the mouse. Scott showed me before I took everything home at the end of December that there is a slot inside the case for the earpiece to put that item's dongle. The boneheaded thing I did was accidentally pushing the ever so slightly smaller keyboard/mouse dongle into that hole, getting it pushed so far inside that I then could not get it out. For a while it was like, well, I won't be able to get these to work at home now so it's just as well that I'm coming back to the office. Eventually I did get it out, though. It took a long time. Shobhit even took a crack at it and couldn't get it. We tried tweezers, a pocket knife; I tried a tiny screw driver, a safety pin, and a nail file. It was actually the nail file that I finally managed to make work much later, after we had gone grocery shopping and then returned. One end of the nail file comes to a point, and I used that point to wear down the corners of the dongle just a bit, as that was what was blocking it from coming back out of the slot. It finally shot right out of there when I banged it against my hand. Whew!

I was futzing with that until Shobhit got home from work, but did not come up; I came down and met him in the car and we drove to the South Asian grocery in Renton called DK Market that is Shobhit's new favorite. We did a huge grocery shop there that cost me just over two hundred bucks. We drove back, watched this week's Peacemaker on HBO Max, and soon after I was going to bed, with all my work stuff packed and ready to bring back.

Shobhit actually did a load of the darks of our laundry at the laundromat this morning. The appliance repair people are scheduled to come and assess the washing machine Monday morning, but Shobhit was out of his black work shirts for Total Wine, so he decided he would take a load to the laundromat, which Ivan himself has now gone to twice. (Alexia had offered to let me do loads at her place, which I have already done once, but she just had her stackable unit replaced and it's not running hot water so even the new one has to be replaced now, which means even she can't do laundry for the time being!) He did make a clever plan, where we went to the laundromat first this morning, loaded the washing machine, then he drove me to work. Then by the time he got back, it was almost ready. Our dryer still works but I think maybe he dried the load at the laundromat anyway because it was a lot of clothes and was probably rather heavy all wet.

I guess he's going to meet with Sachin and some friends for dinner tonight. Which is just as well since Scott and Noah and Tracy and I are going out for our own dinner. Hopefully none of us gets Covid.

[posted 1:05 pm]