Work Saga Continued

So, owner appears with someone...."this is RJ, he'll be starting on Monday". That was it. No comment as to what he'll be doing or anything. Ok.....and?????? I am annoyed but it got better. Owner's wife appears a bit later. Doesn't say anything. Just stands there staring. So I looked at her and ignore for a bit. She's still there. So I turn around again. Oh, don't mind me I'm Maggie. What are u doing? I told her....putting together an ad for the NY directory of school districts so we can tell them about ourselves. Why? Cos we want business. Thought we had a lot of school accounts. Yes, in PA. This is for NY. If we're doing well in PA, why won't this work in other states. It will. It just happened yet cos we've not focused anywhere else. We recruited a sales person just for NY State. Oh. She walked off. And then she starts an argument with one of the AMs. I got this flyer and I don't like it. She's referring to our product catalog that goes out each month. It doesn't encourage me to buy. There are no specials. I get flyers all the time from furniture companies that are doing deals on dining tables. So I go in and see them and maybe while I'm there I buy something else. Really and how often are you in the market for a new dining table. And why is it so big? And why do we list our prices on here...we shouldn't. Ok. It's so big because we have 6 ads from vendors in here that we charge for so our costs are covered. And we show our prices cos resellers particularly like to see them. They use this as a reference document. So you're saying I don't pay anything to produce this? Correct. We make about $6k a month which more than covers our costs. It's a profit center for us!!! For some reason this doesn't shut her up. She marches into the training room where the Product Manager is giving a training session. Next thing I can hear her yelling at him.....very loudly. I want it changed. We should have loss leaders all over it. We shouldn't be listing our prices....blah, blah, blah. PM comes out. What do I do? Nothing. We wait til JB (president and son of nightmare) reappears and then we calmly discuss it. OK.

I phoned JB (out on sales calls) and suggest that he might like to return to the office very soon before the reign of terror takes much more of a hold. Apparently she doesn't like one of the AMs emailing his customer with a list of the items purchased yesterday. The customer had lost his invoice. It took him a minute to pull up the information. The phones aren't ringing so it's not a big deal. Oh yes it is. It's distracting him from sales calls. Actually this AM has such a large customer base that he doesn't really have to do sales calls. His job is account management. And he's damn good at it. Butt out of this please!

She then goes into the VP Ops and yells a bit more.

JB calls me. I tell him the saga...he's not happy. They're on their way back...probably another hour or so. They reappear. The sales manager who had been with him tells me that PM did call and JB told him not to do anything with the product catalog otherwise he'll fire him! LOL JB sits down with mother and explains to her that we do separate postcard campaigns when he have specials that we want to offer. And he tells her about a campaign we're about to do with our new AM. She comes out, goes over to one of the AMs and asks if he thinks she's mad. He says no. She doesn't come and ask me, which is probably just as well cos I would have given her a mouthful...if only for yelling at someone in front of everyone else....I bet the customers love hearing that when they phone in! Then, as JB is telling me about her conversation with her, the AM turns round to say that she's on the phone complaining about the price of our featured system....it's too high. We're selling a very nice system for just over $600. Too high. We should have dropped the price more. She doesn't realise that our resellers don't stock loads of product. They supply on a customer-requested basis so why would they hold stuff on the offchance. There's no point! We're not gonna sell stuff that way...it's not our business.....

Aaaaaaaaagh.