Walking Disaster

It’s the start of February, and I’m trying to consolidate and introduce myself to the major accounts I just required in a territory remapping that left me with two thirds of the country, and a counterpart who still thinks she works harder than me. Myself and a coworker start a zoom call with the purchasing team of a university I now cover, and five minutes into the conversation it becomes clear that I am woefully and pathetically unprepared.

What I thought was an informal introduction instead was a formal business review for which I was required to set up a presentation with a five-year snapshot, multiple graphs, pictures, and a breakdown of shipment times for each order that came through over the last two years. It wasn’t long before the meeting concluded and my coworker announced to the room at large how “that was a bloodbath.” Clearly, those with an MBA were not taught subtlety. He proceeds to double down and tell everyone how he has never seen someone decide to hate us so quickly, and it was the worst meeting the two of us ever had or will ever have in our professional life. Awesome.

Since I was trying my level best not to cry, the only thing anyone could think of to comfort me was to say, “it’s okay! They’re under contract, so they’re legally not allowed to leave!” Which made me feel more like the villain in a made-for-TV banking movie, rather than a saleswoman. So I asked the bullpen to give me a distraction: was there any busy work that needed doing or just some task that I couldn’t fuck up? At this point, someone pipes up from the back and asks me to help with an email because they don’t understand what it means. The confusion came from the word, “bimonthly”, at which point the same coworker in the meeting with me and I answered simultaneously, but with different answers. I correctly thought it meant every two months. He incorrectly thought it meant twice a month. The marketing associate who was born post-2000 thought it meant liking two months.

“Bi means two, so it stands to reason that bimonthly means twice a month.”
“No, bi means two, therefore it would be two months, so every two months.”
“But when you use bi for biweekly, that means every two weeks.”
“Yes, which means bimonthly can’t be twice a month!”
“Well, biweekly could also be twice a week.”’

I know I’m already prone to hyperbole, but that was exactly how our argument played out. Almost verbatim.

I have been in an office setting enough in my life to know what was about to happen. This became a debate to such levels that it rivaled the day we all disagreed on whether a burger is a sandwich (it fucking is, by the way). It escalated to such high levels that outside coworkers were brought in through our various teams’ chats and, as far as anyone could tell — there was no resolution, and we succeeded only in pissing off our bosses. Google was entirely unhelpful, a sentence which I genuinely never thought I would say, because the top definition on Google smugly stated that, similarly to its name, bimonthly has two definitions. What is Google even for, if not to solve childish arguments like this and prove that I am actually right? We ended up wasting the better part of the day debating/arguing, somehow then/than got brought in, and we left it divided.

Cut to about a month and a half later, when I finally redo my presentation with this university team where I can decisively prove to the Dowager Queen of Purchasing that I am professional and that she should buy all the stuff from me. It went relatively well, my graphs and data tables were well received, and my coworker did not leave me hanging this time. We made it through most of it when I got a little overconfident…the same way I get when I see that there are still leftovers, regardless of the two full plates of spaghetti I’ve already had. I have only myself to blame. I figured it was a good time to ask about the exclusivity of a few of the brands we sell. While I’m sure she meant to smile, the head purchaser’s smirk served only to emphasize her crows’ feet and to make me shit myself. She thought my argument made sense and agreed to consider the exclusivity, but she would like to see order data reported bimonthly for the rest of the year.

I think I blacked out after that.