Chapter 5

I got another job, and was gone on it for two weeks. This one involved another shipping issue, but sort of in reverse. Tan Gen owned a company named Anderson Imports that drop shipped shoes for dozens of internet shopping sites. The original site would take the order and send it to Anderson, who would ship the product directly to the customer. That part worked pretty well. They were shipping thousands of pairs a day, mostly on time and mostly the right order. It was the returns that were killing them. That's because they got a lot of returns. You'll remember I said "mostly" a couple of times.

When you have an inventory of half a million pairs of shoes, that inventory needs to be correct. Everything needs to be labeled correctly, and in the correct storage location. If it's not that way, then the picker pulls the wrong pair of shoes and sends them happily to shipping. That generates unhappy customers ... and lots of returns.

The supervisors couldn't figure out how so many shoes were ending up in the wrong places. The alternative way of looking at that was to wonder why your computer records didn't match reality.

The first thing I noticed was the literal mountain of returned boxes of shoes that were not in any storage location, because they were all stacked up in the receiving area. There were pallets of the things. Those shoes alone represented thousands of erroneous storage entries, because when returns were processed back into inventory, the location they were supposed to go to was entered into the computer. If those shoes were sold again while they were in this mountain, the picker would never know where to find them.

The lowest paid employees in the plant were the ones who took those shoes, stacked up on little push carts, and went to put them away. They were getting minimum wage. They had nothing invested in the success of the company. They really didn't give a flying fuck where those shoes ended up. So, depending on how far away they were from their restocking quota for the hour, they sometimes stuck them wherever was handy.

And that had fucked up the whole system.

There were other problems too, but most of them could be handled if existing policies were actually enforced. The owner of the company was a nice old gentleman who'd been in business for forty years, and looked at his employees as if they were family. That might have worked in times past. His employees might, thirty years ago, have looked at him as the kindly father type. Now they viewed him as that old man who sat up in the office and made big bucks while they slaved away in his plant.

The fix I proposed was two-pronged. First, I suggested that no supervisor should get a Christmas bonus unless what he was supervising ran well. The second was to pay the restockers enough that they suddenly cared a lot about losing their job. In fact, I suggested that the restockers should be paid more than the people who did the original stocking when shoes arrived from the various factories. I felt like double their current pay, which was minimum wage, might do the trick. Basically, restocking needed to be the most sought after job in the company, at least for lower level employees, so that people competed to get those spots. I told the vice president of operations that if he did that, it would cost him a lot in the beginning, but that, within six months, he would only need a third of his current number of restocking employees, because they wouldn't have as many returns, because the right shoes would be in the right spot when they were pulled to ship in the first place.

I also suggested they use bar coding to pull orders with. This outfit had been in business a long time, and their systems were as antiquated as the building. But upgrading to that system would take at least a million dollars, so I didn't expect them to jump right on that.

Then I went back home.

Again I got welcomed with open arms by the kids. It made me feel good. Usually kids shy away from me. That might have to do with the fact that I'm five ten and weigh two-forty and have a big, bushy beard. I've been told I remind people of Grizzly Adams.

I got a running commentary from both at the same time on everything that had happened while I was gone. I couldn't understand any of it.

I looked up to see Valerie leaning against the wall, watching us. I mouthed, "Hi" to her and she smiled. She was wearing an outfit I'd never seen, and it occurred to me that I hadn't paid her anything since I'd hired her. I told the kids I needed to talk to their mother and, like kids do, they lost interest in me suddenly and completely.

As I approached, I had the strongest urge to kiss her on the cheek ... a "hello" kind of kiss. I only licked my lips instead.

"I've never paid you anything," I said.

"It's okay. I paid me."

"You did?"

"You left me the credit card."

"You can't pay yourself with the company credit card," I said.

"Why not? I'm keeping the books. And I didn't actually pay me any cash. We just used it for the things we needed while you were gone."

"But that's going to be a nightmare in the books," I objected.

"Well, you're the boss. What do you suggest I do?"

I thought that was obvious.

"We do transfers of your salary from my bank account to yours," I said.

She blinked.

"But that would mean I have access to your account."

"Yes." I thought that was obvious too.

"But you can't just give me unfettered access to your bank account!" she yipped. "What if I cleaned it out and ran off?!"

"Would you do that?" I asked.

"Well, of course not!" she snapped. "But I could if I wanted to. You could come back from some job somewhere and find out you're broke!"

"All right," I said. "How about this. I'll set up an account for you to be paid out of. And to pay expenses from. Let's say we only put a couple hundred grand in that one. You can have access to that one to make transfers into your account, and write checks on for company business. Like paying off the company credit card."

"A couple of hundred thousand?!" She goggled. "Just how rich are you?"

I felt my brow furrow.

"I don't know. I haven't checked lately."

"Well how much was there the last time you checked?"

"Something like ten or twelve million, I guess. It changes as investments make or lose money."

She paled. Then she wobbled. I reached to stabilize her and she leaned against me.

"This isn't real," she whispered.

"I promise it is. Why would I lie to you?"

"You take in a complete stranger off the street. You let her and her children just live with you, no strings attached. You give her access to millions of dollars? Nobody does that, Bob!"

"Okay," I said. "The deal's off. Get out. And take your miserable little rug rats with you."

That put some stiff back in her joints. She pushed off of me, fire in her eyes. Color flowed back into her cheeks. I couldn't help it. I looked down at her breasts. Yup, those nipples were on display again. That was a little sad. I'd hoped that was always because she was interested in me.

"Calm down," I said, to stop her from speaking. Actually, she was spluttering and incapable of lucid speech. But she'd get there sooner or later and I didn't want to hear that. "It's my money, and I get to trust whoever I want to with it. Don't give me a hard time because I trusted you."

She did calm down, though her face was still marred by a frown.

"Sweet Jesus, Bob," she sighed.

"I'd trust him with it too," I said. "But he was never interested in money."

Perhaps that was something that was strange enough to break the mood, because she giggled. Then she laughed.

"That's better," I said. "We can't have my executive assistant going off the deep end like that. We'll figure something out that you're comfortable with, okay?"

"You can't do this!" she groaned. "What if I wanted to kiss you or something?"

I raised both eyebrows.

"I would approve," I said. Then I winced. "But only if you really wanted to."

"How will I ever know if I really want to?" she said, that spark back in her eye. "If I even think about it I'll feel like a gold digger!"

"You're not a gold digger," I said, confidently.

"How do you know that?" she asked, acid in her voice.

"How much did you spend while I was gone?"

That shut her up. I could see the gears turning in her head as she actually tried to add it up in her mind.

"Ten thousand?"

She blanched.

"Of course not!"

"Five?" I didn't give her time to object to that one. I'd only been gone two weeks. I didn't even think she'd spent two hundred a week. "Two? Did you even spend a thousand dollars? Well I probably did, and there's only one of me and three of you. You bought at least one new outfit and, since you only owned four or five when I left, I'd hope you expanded your wardrobe more than that. But you're no gold digger. I'm a pretty good judge of character. When you have money, you have to be. If you were that kind of woman, I'd never have let you stay."

"You can't know for sure," she argued.

"If you were that kind of woman you'd never have let me out of bed the other morning," I said.

She closed her eyes. Then she opened them and stared right at me.

"Well you can bet your ass that if there's ever a next time, I won't. What are you going to do then, mister great judge of character?"

"Probably what I wished I was able to do all night long," I said. It was a shot, not a suggestion. I didn't mean to suggest that she needed to be concerned about me. It was one of those witty things you say that turns out not to be so witty in the end.

She could give as good as she got, though. She backed away from me and folded her arms under her breasts. Somehow, this time, I knew she really was displaying them. Like I said, she was well aware of how she looked, and what the men around her liked to look at.

Then she stuck her tongue out at me, like she was ten years old.

"In your dreams, big boy!" she taunted. "In your fricking dreams!"

Again, I could have chased her. I could have caught her. I'm convinced she'd have let me do that. And who knows what might have happened then? We were both a little fired up. But, again, she was in a world that was strange and different than her own. She was on shifting sands, and I felt discretion was the better part of valor, like that old saying goes.

Besides. This was kind of fun. I hadn't flirted with a woman in a long time, and women rarely flirted with me. And if things progressed to a point where it didn't work anymore, then all this fun would evaporate. I'd be very sad if that happened. I already knew I was going to miss this woman a lot when she moved into the house Dean was building for her. Of course I planned on keeping her employed, and that was another reason not to screw things up.

Valerie busied herself with making a meat loaf. That she had decided to be domestic didn't surprise me. She was a single mom who couldn't afford carry out all the time, so she had to know her way around a kitchen. Who was I to take away her skill set? Besides, she was a better cook than I was.

I went to my office and got on the elliptical machine. I saw that the setting had been changed. I usually use it on a four, and it was on a two now. I didn't envision the kids doing that, which meant Valerie had been working out on it. I clicked it back to a four and started my workout. I'm not good at doing those religiously, and I felt it right away. I was out of shape.

I like certain kinds of pain, particularly if I think that pain is going to benefit me in some way. So I was still doggedly putting miles on the machine when she came into the bedroom and said it was time to eat.

"Not that way, though," she said. "Take a shower. You probably stink."

"Oh yeah?" I panted. "Well you probably smell like ... meatloaf or something!"

"Oooooo," she said. "Now I'm scared. Is the big, bad wolf going to eat me up?"

This time I did catch her.

And I dragged her kicking and screaming into the shower before I turned the water on full bore.

It was fucking cold!

Women don't have a sense of humor about some things. Like the poetic justice - or maybe irony - of telling a man to take a shower because of how he probably smells, and then ending up in the shower herself because of how she probably smells.

No sense of humor at all.

The kids, on the other hand, thought the whole thing was hilarious, even when she stomped past them, sputtering and cursing. Actually, there wasn't all that much cursing. Most of it involved the phrase, "My hair!" I found out what that was about as, over the next hour, she reminded me that her hair was still damp and, just in case I'd forgotten, whose fault it was that it was damp.

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Bewitched

Lubrican

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