Corporate flew someone in. His name was Grant. He was 34. He had a full head of hair — the kind that holds a part without product, the kind that will still be there at 50 — and he pulled a rolling bag down aisle four at 6:40 AM like a man arriving at a gate he had plenty of time to reach.

I noticed the hair first. I want to be honest about that. I noticed it before the bag, before the badge, before the initiative.

There is nothing wrong with my hair. It is simply doing something else now, somewhere further back.

He did not introduce himself. He introduced the initiative.

"So we're doing a walk," he said, already walking. "Nothing formal. Just a walk." I have heard that sentence before, in a conference room called The Falcon, from a man who also had hair. Nothing formal is the most formal thing anyone in this country can say to you.

We walked. He photographed a shelf tag that was correct. He photographed it anyway.

He asked me what my endcap "story" was. I said it was Pop-Tarts. He said no — what's the story. I looked at the Pop-Tarts. The Pop-Tarts looked back. Sixty-one weeks in this store and no one had ever asked me what the Pop-Tarts were trying to say.

He found the deli thermometer log. Every line initialed. Every temperature in range. He held it at arm's length like it had been recovered from a wreck. "Right, but is anyone reading it," he said. Not a question. He set it down without closing it. Somewhere in me a much younger man in a much better suit remembered producing forty thousand pages in a Bankers Box war room and being asked, by someone with hair, whether anyone was going to read them.

At 7:15 he asked about my "bench." I said I had four night-shift associates and one of them reads Dostoevsky. He wrote something down. I want to be clear that he wrote something down when I said that.

Tabitha came out of the office at 7:30 with the Big Gulp and did not look at me once. "Grant, honey, you want coffee? Ours is terrible." Grant laughed.

Grant had not laughed at anything I said. She walked him to the customer service desk and they talked for eleven minutes about a conference in Boise while I stood beside a floor display of shelf-stable oat milk with my clipboard held at chest height like a man waiting to be photographed for a memorial.

He left at 8:05. At the automatic doors he turned around and said, "Really solid store, Evan. Really solid." Then: "I'll send some notes."

The notes came at 4:44 PM. Nine bullet points. Item three was consider revisiting endcap narrative. Item seven was log compliance strong — ensure engagement. Item nine had no verb in it at all. Subject line: Great seeing the team today! No ask. No deadline. No one cc'd who could say yes or no to any of it — which is its own kind of instruction, and I recognized it, because I used to write them.

Nothing was wrong. He found nothing. Every temperature was in range, every tag was correct, the floors were clean, the bench was staffed, and the store had been running at 98.4% for fourteen consecutive periods. He came two thousand miles to photograph a shelf tag that was already right, and now there are nine things I have to do about it by Friday.

I printed the email. I put it in the folder with the others. The folder is thick now — it doesn't close flat anymore, so I've started laying it on its side in the drawer, which means I can't read the tab, which means every time I need it I open the drawer and just know.

This is fine.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5897746&forum_id=2Reputation#50096004)