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Momentous week at work so far. Let's go through it!
My new boss's name is Gabby. It's also Gabrielle, and she seems totally noncommittal about which she prefers: she says she's fine with either. I asked if she has a preference—a natural question, given the degree to which I am a stickler about people calling me Matthew—and she basically assured me she doesn't. The feels very nonintuitive and unnatural to me, not to care, but different people are different, I guess!
Anyway, yesterday was her first day. And I have to say, as first impressions go, she's done better than any new boss I've had before. She's also in a unique position as my new boss, though, because she's the first one I've had who was hired externally. Stephanie, Jennifer, Scott, Chris, Eric—all of these people either worked at PCC before I did, or had many years at PCC before becoming my boss. Yesterday was straight up Gabby's first day at PCC.
But, in other news: one in, one out!
Darrell sent out a Teams meeting invite early yesterday morning for 10 a.m., the meeting title just
Touch base.
My immediate thought was to wonder if he was announcing his departure. Without getting too specific, I'll just say I know multiple former staff who would be delighted by
that news. (For the record, I am personally quite definitively neutral regarding Darrell, an easy position for me to take as I was never one of his direct reports. He's the Senior Vice President of Merchandising.) But, almost as quickly as it occurred to me, I dismissed it: what were the odds of that? I figured it was more likely the meeting was to introduce us all to Gabby on her first day.
Turns out, I was actually right to begin with. Gabby wasn't even in on the meeting, and seemed somewhat disappointed not to have been invited to it when I told her about it later: literally the only other people in Merchandising who were
not on the call were Noah and Shelley, who were traveling to trade shows yesterday. Gabby spent a lot of time with Eric yesterday though, getting oriented on her first day. Darrell did mention her, and said she was "training."
I have to say, the one thing I was struck by in that meeting was the non-reaction by the entire department on the Teams call. Even though Darrell said at least twice, "I know it's a shock," to me it was less shock than simple non-reactions. He's been here eight years, another thing that was mentioned more than once, but no one on the call said anything along the lines of "We're so sad to see you go," or "We'll miss you." Nothing to that effect whatsoever. Again, I have too little direct interaction with him to judge with any authority, but I still found that rather interesting. The whole department just took the news passively, Darrell added a few more tidbits after Krish, our CEO who sat next to him in the conference room next to my desk for most of the meeting, left. And then the call ended.
I was eager to text the news to certain people immediately, just to spread the gossip. But, Krish stressed that it was confidential until the announcement was sent out to the entire co-op at the end of the day. The email wasn't actually sent out until this morning, saying Darrell is resigning "to pursue his next adventure as a consultant and independent business advisor," but at Krish's request he will stay for the next couple of months, through the end of Q1. The email also suggested there may be some kind of send-off celebration closer to his actual departure. That should be interesting too; maybe there will be a more direct sense of warmth toward him there.
Not long after that meeting, Eric brought Gabby by my desk to introduce her to me, and also had her sit with me to chat and get her to know her a bit, tell her more about what I do here, etc. That happened at about 11:30 and so we chatted for about half an hour until my lunch break at noon. This was how I learned that although she, like many others hired externally, has previous experience at both corporate behemoths Amazon and Starbucks, is a Seattle native and has been a member-shopper of PCC for many years. When Amazon came up as one of her previous employers, she joked, "It's a small online retailer called Amazon. They sell books." We talked about how suspicious people at PCC get of new hires with recent jobs at places like that, and how she clearly already knows that well, and quasi-facetiously feels like she has to whisper the name of these corporations she worked for. As I told her, though, I don't jump into news like that with judgment: for all I know, people leave those places for PCC with the idea that they actually don't
want to be in that kind of corporate environment anymore. And she seemed to appreciate that.
I have to say, though, that as of this morning, Gabby
really cemented the positivity of the first impression she made: I came to my desk to find a small plant and a card. It truly did not occur to me that it would be from Gabby until I opened the card, because why would I expect something like that from a new boss? I really figured it must have been from one of the several brokers who semi-regularly leave me gifts. But, then I
opened the card, which congratulated me for my 20 years at PCC—I told her about that being my anniversary last year during our meeting yesterday—and then expressing enthusiasm for our future working together. And, I fell like this is kind of a crucial point: it felt sincere, nothing disingenuous about it. I thought it was legitimately sweet, and not just that, but genuinely impressive that she made such quick work of it. She had to have left the office yesterday, gone to a store for the plant and card, and then returned with them so I would find them when I got to work today. All on her cram-packed first day! I'm already getting the feeling that she's very sharp and on top of things, which bodes well for her success in this role.
I suppose the only open question, really, is how well our personalities work together going forward. One day can offer first impressions, sure, but only time tells what a person is really like, or how well people work together. Today, though, I'm feeling really good about it. We had a meeting between 11 and noon this morning to start familiarizing her with HQ, the item maintenance program that I use every day at work, and specifically the process of adding new skus for coupons. It went really well, and in contrast to many other examples of my trying to explain things to people, I felt like I did a decent job of explaining, and she understood everything well.
That's not even the last of the momentous news, though! I also arrived this morning to an email from Gabby that she'd gotten a covid exposure yesterday . . . from Darrell himself. He apparently tested positive yesterday. This brings up a ton of questions to me: at what point did he test, and why? Does he test every day as a matter of course? Every Monday? Did he test because he noticed symptoms of some kind, in which case why did he come to the office? He was not displaying any outward symptoms at all during the call. But, Gabby had at least one 30-minute meeting alone with him in a windowless meeting room yesterday, as did Eric, and so they are both wearing masks at work today, and testing every day for the next several days. Both are officially testing negative today, so there's that.
Now, I cannot really find anything online to corroborate this, but according to Gabriel, you won't pass on covid to another person the very same day of exposure. So, the way I see it, the odds of my getting it from Gabby (who sat with me for half an hour yesterday, albeit at my desk rather than in a meeting room, which I guess is better) are extremely low. And hopefully she doesn't test positive anyway—she did tell me she's actually never gotten it before, which to me actually
increases the odds of her catching it, her having had all four vaccines and having had several previous exposures notwithstanding. Whatever the case, I'm not regarding it as a huge risk. There does seem to be a bit of irony, though, in the timing of this positive test on the exact day Darrell announced his departure.
The momentous occasions this week are yet to finish, by the way: Eric is doing my annual review on Thursday. And now, we plan to have Gabby join in for it. So if Eric has anything particularly critical to say, that should be interesting. I don't particularly expect that to be the case, but you never know, right? And we also have this new element of setting goals for the following year, which really makes sense for Gabby to be a part of, since Eric will no longer be doing my reviews going forward.
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So, what else? I spent my evening at home last night. Shobhit had a Braeburn Condos Zoom meeting for more feedback on the window replacement project coming up over the next couple of years, which is going to be major and the most disruptive thing to happen to our building since we moved in in 2007. In the meantime, I watched the latest Neal Brennan comedy special on Netflix, which I found surprisingly regressive after his previous, incredibly well done special with the three different microphones for three different types of comedy. This one was a lot more straightforward and standard, the use of shaped "blocks" on a wall behind him notwithstanding (hence the special's title,
Blocks). He spends an inordinate amount of time talking about differences between men and women, and . . . honestly? Yawn. Some of it was kind of funny. On the whole it was well-worn territory.
He also mentions trans issues at one point, taking care not to talk about trans people specifically, but rather about the very idea of talking about trans people, and how tricky it can be—for straight white guys like him, anyway. He makes a joke about the audience clamming up in response, and saying "Don't go out like your boy," a reference to his longtime friendship and professional collaboration with Dave Chappelle, whose well-publicized comments about trans people and trans issues are objectively lazy and ignorant. The problem I have with this positioning, that being that it's supposedly so tricky to talk about trans people and trans issues, is that really, it doesn't have to be if you just take the time to educate yourself. And that's something Dave Chappelle has never done at all, and it kind of feels like Neal Brennan isn't far from it. He just avoided the topic otherwise because of a supposed fear of walking in a minefield. People like him don't seem to want to acknowledge that they're the ones laying down those mines.
Anyway, after Shobhit's meeting was done, we watched the fourth episode of
Bad Sisters on Apple TV+. When we watched the first episode, Shobhit actually said, "Not bad." He nodded off at one point during last night's episode, but we soon thereafter fully engaged again. I think I'm enjoying it more than he is, but it's working enough for both of us. I just want to make full use of my three months free subscription to the service that came with the upgrade of my iPhone. I actually think a lot of good stuff can be found on Apple TV+, I just have no interest in adding yet another streaming subscription. It's getting ridiculous.
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I had hoped to go see
80 for Brady with Shobhit tonight, choosing a Tuesday because then his ticket would be discounted at just under $7. But, Shobhit wants to watch the State of the Union address at 6:00. So, we bumped the movie to Tuesday next week. And then I rearranged my other movie plans for the next two weeks: tomorrow is Action Might Night in the Braeburn Condos theater; Thursday I'll see the Arctic polar ice cap expedition documentary
Exposure at the Egyptian; Friday I'll see the French film about an intimate friendship between adolescent boys called
Close at the Uptown. I plan to see the 25th-anniversary re-release of
Titanic at Pacific Place on Sunday; and then, finally, after
80 for Brady on the 14th (Shobhit decided we would just do that instead of going out for dinner for Valentine's Day), on Wednesday the 15th I'll see a film called
Godland at the Uptown. And that'll be the last of my movie-going before we leave for Australia.
Last year, I saw nine films in January and eleven films in February. I'm well behind that so far this year: eight films in January, and if all goes as planned above, in the end I'll have seen six films (new releases, I mean, that I review) in February. Even in 2020, the last time we went to Australia, I had seen and reviewed 17 films by the end of February. But, whatever, this is just a reflection of the state of cinema these days, plus all the other things on my calendar. I'm meeting Laney for an afternoon Happy Hour this Saturday, for example.
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Let's see, what else? I'm on a weird Bananarama kick right now for some reason. I have no idea why. I must have heard "Venus" playing somewhere and decided I would find their music on Apple Music—once upon a time I had, like, three or four of their cassettes. They disappeared for some reason or another roughly thirty years ago; the music-listening tracker that I have goes all the way back to 1995 and no Bananarama albums were even listed on it. Until now.
I was still pretty familiar with the songs from their first four albums:
Deep Sea Skiving (1983);
Bananarama (1984);
True Confessions (1986) and
WOW! (1987). These are the only four albums with all three original singers, and even though they are super-synthesized, uber-eighties sounds, I've enjoyed revisiting them. And then, since I have access to virtually everything now on Apple Music, I've been moving ahead, though subsequent albums of theirs I have never heard. It turns out they have
twelve full length albums, the most recent released just last year. Everything after 1988 (when they released their first Greatest Hits collection) has been without that singer who left, though; all but one of them with only two singers, making them a duo rather than a trio ever since 1993. So far I've listened to
Pop Life (1991) and currently
Please Yourself (1993) and, with one or two fun tracks here and there, it sounds like pretty generic nineties pop, honestly.
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[posted 12:29 pm]
