ONBOARDING / 05 / THE CATALOG

​​internal documentation from Product Classification: a product line with no public record

May Season Studio Archives

by Gintare O.

preceding file: Onboarding / 04/ Frank

The sticky note said what it said. She read it three more times over the weekend and did not gain anything from re-reading it. Four words did not become five. What Frank had meant by them was going to have to come from context.

She thought about this Sunday afternoon at the kitchen counter, in the same seat she had opened the card in. The notebook was open in front of her. She was not writing anything. She was looking at the sticky note, which she had put back in the notebook after taking it out three times.

They file the people. It was a Frank sentence in some ways. Frank had written catalog descriptions for eleven years. Frank had thought about what filing something meant more than most people did. Frank had also, in Genny’s experience, been a person who used more words than he needed. Four words was Frank saying something the way Frank did not usually say things. Which meant he had done it deliberately. Which meant he had chosen those four words over other words he could have chosen.

She sat with it. She did not write anything down. She was entering the part of the week where she started to work the problem, which was, historically, what she did with the things she could not file. She was a person who could not file this. She was going to have to file it, however partially, until it stopped taking up counter space in her head.

She would pull up Frank’s queue Monday morning.

She would look at what he had been working on before he stopped coming in.

She would see if anything on it made sense.

Monday she came in at 7:58.

Dale was at his cube. His monitor was on. He had a small potted plant on the corner of his desk that had not been there Friday. It was a snake plant. It was doing the thing snake plants did, which was to sit there and look at nothing.

Karen was at her cube. Karen said good morning to Genny as she walked past, which Karen had never done, but which was becoming a Monday habit. Genny said good morning back. She sat down. She opened her queue.

The system that held the catalog was called Ledger. It was branded internally like everything at MSS, in a font Karen approved of and colors that appeared nowhere else at the company. Ledger was a database with a web front-end. It held every product entered into MSS’s catalog going back to the founding of the company, which was a date nobody at Genny’s level had access to, but which was somewhere around 1873.

Frank had had access to Ledger the same as Genny had. His queue was still visible in the shared workspace, marked with his username and the last-modified date. HR had not disabled his account. This was consistent with a leave of absence. HR did not disable accounts of people on leave.

She waited until Karen was on a call. She waited until Blake was in the break room. Then she pulled up Frank’s queue.

She was not sure what she was looking for. She was, at minimum, looking for anything Frank had touched in his last week that had been flagged by the system.

The system flagged descriptions for a lot of reasons. Inconsistent attribute tagging. Missing SKUs. Copy that fell outside standard length parameters. Descriptions that referenced products not in the master. There were usually four or five flagged items per person per week. It was routine.

Frank had thirty seven flags in his last week.

She sorted them by flag type.

Twenty three of them were attribute tagging inconsistencies. That was Karen’s usual complaint about Frank. Frank had been sloppy about tagging in the last year. Frank had also, she thought as she scrolled, been sloppy in a specific direction. He had been under-tagging. He had been leaving fields blank that most people filled. Genny had assumed for a while that this was Frank being lazy. Looking at thirty seven of them at once, she was less sure.

Nine of them were length violations. Descriptions too short. Frank had written product copy in the two to three sentence range when the standard was five to seven. He had been getting closer to the minimum every week for the last two months.

Five of them were SKU mismatches. The SKU on the description did not match any product in the master.

She opened the first SKU mismatch.

The description was for a coffee mug. The copy was three sentences. It described the mug in terms that any mug could have been described. Ceramic. Fourteen ounces. Suitable for hot beverages. No color specified. No pattern specified. No brand specified.

The SKU was fourteen digits and began with a prefix she had never seen before. She had worked in catalog for four years. She knew the prefixes. There were twenty six of them, one for each product line. The first two letters of a SKU told you the line. Coffee mugs were HB. Frank’s SKU began with RA.

She opened the second SKU mismatch. The description was for a wristwatch. Three sentences. Suitable for daily wear. Water resistant. Adjustable band. No brand. No color. No dial style. The SKU began with RA.

The third was a picture frame. Same three-sentence template. Same RA prefix.

The fourth was a scarf.

The fifth was stationery.

She stopped at the fifth one.

The description read:

Cream cardstock. Cotton weave. Suitable for correspondence, invitations, and formal notices. Ink absorbency high. Fold retention indefinite.

She did not move.

She read it again. Then she read it out loud, quietly, at a level below what her headphones would have covered if she had been playing anything through them, which she was not.

Cotton weave. Cream. High ink absorbency. Fold retention indefinite.

She had held this paper in her hand. She had unfolded it and refolded it and left it face down on the kitchen table. It had bent stiffly. It had not wanted to fold flat. She had thought at the time, holding it, that whoever made paper like this had made it to last.

The description was the card.

The description was a product description of the card that had appeared inside her notebook, which she had not received in the mail, which had been given to her by a hand she could not identify.

The SKU began with RA. It was fourteen digits. She did not recognize any of them.

She looked at the metadata. Last modified by Frank. Time stamp: two weeks before he stopped coming in.

There was a comment thread on the description. Two comments. Both from Karen. The first: this needs full tagging. The second, timestamped four days later: withdrawing my note. This has been reviewed above me.

Above Karen was not a real place. Karen was a divisional manager. There was a director above her whose name Genny did not know, because Genny had never had reason to know it. There was, presumably, a whole hierarchy she had never had reason to know. She had assumed for four years that this hierarchy was normal in the way corporate hierarchies were normal, which was to say pointless.

The description was still in the system. It was still flagged. It had been sitting there for weeks, half-processed, waiting for somebody to finish it.

She did not finish it. She did not touch it.

She copied the SKU into her notebook.

She wrote it on a fresh page. She wrote the letters carefully. Then she wrote, underneath, the word CARD. She circled it.

She closed the notebook.

She had thought, when she had started, that Frank’s descriptions were going to be about the box. She had thought she would find one that matched what had come to her cube Tuesday. She had found it. She had also found four others that did not obviously match anything, and a prefix she had never seen. Which meant Frank had been working on a product line she did not know existed. Which meant there was a product line she did not know existed. Which meant her catalog, which she had thought was the catalog, was not the catalog.

She did not know what to do with this yet. She held it on the counter of her attention. She would need to hold it for a while before she knew what to do with it.

She went back to her own queue at 11:15. She worked through Q4 imports for the rest of the morning. She ate her lunch at her desk. She did not open Frank’s queue again. She did not look at his cube, which was Dale’s cube now, and which had a snake plant on the corner where Frank’s aloe had been.

At 3:45 Blake asked her if she wanted to walk to the coffee shop on the corner. She said no thanks. Blake did not ask why. Blake never asked why. He went alone.

She did four more product descriptions. She checked her email twice. She was, she noticed, checking her email more than she usually did, which was a small tell she chose not to hold.

At 4:58 she opened her drawer to pack up.

Her laptop chimed.

She looked at the screen.

An email had arrived in her inbox. She had not been expecting one. It had come in at 4:58, which was the minute she was packing up, which was the specific minute she had opened her drawer.

The sender field was blank.

The subject line was: You have viewed restricted material.

The body was two words: No action required.

There was no signature. There was no header. There was no company branding. The email did not appear to come from an address at all. When she hovered her mouse over the sender field, nothing populated. It was as though the message had arrived without a source.

She did not reply.

She sat with her hand on the mouse for a full ten seconds.

Then she marked the email read. She closed the window. She put the notebook in her bag. She closed the drawer. She put on her coat.

She walked out through the lobby at 5:03. The building was doing what it always did at 5:03. People were leaving. The revolving door was going. The Starbucks was closing up. Everything was normal.

She did not look at Karen’s cube on the way out.

She did not look at Dale’s cube either.

The notebook, in her bag, smelled like flowers and like the thing she was going to know how to name eventually.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, all catalog entries are reviewed at the appropriate level. some entries are reviewed above the appropriate level. the distinction is not visible to the reviewer.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Product Classification maintains the catalog. Other departments maintain other records.

Begin with:

The Company That Regulates Reality -what the company says it does, stated plainly

Compliance Notice: Narrative Drift Detected - what the paperwork does when it notices you first

Product Feedback Response - a customer notices something. the response is on file.

Part six arrives next Friday.