Spreadsheets for the End of the World

On the morning of the day that the world ends, Randall wakes at his usual time, pre-alarm, and gets out of bed. He brushes his teeth, shaves his face, and combs what is left of his hair. He pours his coffee into his “Ten Years of Service” award mug; the only mug that he has used for the past fourteen years. He grimaces. It tastes as though it has been sitting for days. He opens the top to check the filter. The expected amount of wet grounds are caked to the paper; a crater sits in the middle from the percolator’s drip.

He looks at the clock and it is 5:12. This is six minutes later than the moment he takes his first sip of coffee every other morning. He feels his face, and runs his tongue along the surface of his molars, searching for signs that he has spent longer than normal on his grooming routine. None appear. On mornings that he is running late (this has only happened once, when he had cut himself shaving and required several rounds of toilet paper fragments to control the bleed), he has a triage system prepared for what could be cut to claw back more time. If less than ten minutes, the first thing to go is packing lunch. He is surrounded by lunch options all day, after all. If greater than ten minutes, he has devised a complex system of combinations of tasks totaling various lengths that can be dropped together depending on the circumstances. This has never happened. 

Randall gets into his car at 5:21, one minute ahead of schedule. He settles his shoulders and observes the morning through his windshield. The shadows are off but he cannot articulate what is wrong with them. He raises his key to the ignition as he performs mental trigonometry to determine if it has something to do with the angle of the sun but is interrupted by a sudden, deafening blast of “Carry on my wayward son…” through the dashboard speakers. He jumps and lets out a groan as the lap belt digs into the tops of his thighs. He punches the volume knob off and grips the side panel with his other hand. The car was locked overnight, he is sure of it. He looks over both shoulders and checks the backseat. It is empty. The odometer reads 127,539.6 miles, exactly where he left it when he returned home from work the night before. 

He puts the car in reverse and backs out of his driveway, then starts down his street to begin the seven minute and twenty second (give or take) journey to the store. The shadows are still off. He realizes that this is because there is no sun this morning, and yet the shadows have strong contours as if it were a clear summer day. For a brief moment, he recalls learning about how just after Vesuvius exploded, the people living in Pompeii were covered in a cloud of pumice that blocked out the sun. They bumbled about, confused, wondering if they should stay, unable to see the 20-mile-high ash column suspended in the sky above their city. 

At a stop sign, Randall rolls down his window and sticks his head out, surveilling in every direction he can crane his neck in. No ash column in sight. Just a cloudy day. He wonders if he would have fled Pompeii, and thinks that he likely would not have. If that ancient version of himself were anything like the present-day version of himself, then he certainly would not have. The people of Biltmore need him. In the event of a catastrophic natural disaster, without him, where would they obtain their food? 

He pulls into the empty parking lot of Myer’s Grocery and parks in a spot directly to the right of the main entrance marked with a sign reading “Reserved for Manager Randall Nowak.” He smiles. It took eight years to convince Bern to add his name to the sign. 

He unlocks the side door that leads directly into the store’s back office and flips on the light switch. It takes a few seconds longer than normal for the first flicker, and the light then stutters to life illuminating a dingy room lined with desks. A single clipboard lies next to a sleeping monitor on the desk in the corner. Its papers show the day’s delivery schedule with inventory counts. Randall picks it up and feels a calm energy wash over his synapses as he measures the day ahead of him in fifteen minute predictable increments. He looks at his watch and startles. Seven minutes until dairy arrives, although he is certain that he had at least twenty to first inspect the night shift’s space allocation in the back refrigerators. Where is the time going? Flustered, he rushes to hang his bag and jacket and fumbles with the main electrical panel, triggering the network of ceiling lights all the way from bakery to produce. He is too busy to notice that many of them do not turn on, creating only a checkered pattern of fluorescence throughout the store. He throws on his maroon manager’s blazer, which sports his nametag and boasts his twenty-four years of service. 

Speedwalking through the empty aisles, he is aware of the smell before he reaches the refrigerated section. It is subtle, but after twenty-four years he can close his eyes and tell you what day of the week it is based on smell and knowledge of the delivery schedule alone. It smells like a Wednesday, the day before produce delivery, when the strawberries at the bottom of their plastic containers are beginning to mold and the avocados are finally pliable. But it is Friday. The day that the store should smell of fresh citrus and herbs just-cut from the greenhouses. And yet, he can smell the subtle turning of fruits begging to be consumed in their final hours of lividity. He glances at his watch. Three minutes until dairy, no time to investigate. A bead of sweat rolls down the vein that is bulging from his temple. 

Randall rushes through the next two hours of his morning, always behind schedule by several minutes. The deliveryman had mentioned something about problems with the power at other stores, but he cannot process the meaning of it when everything is so off track. He greets his staff, half of whom were late to work this morning. He straightens cans and boxes to perfection and takes notes of low inventory. Finally, the order of things has been confirmed, and he returns to the back office. He begins his mid-morning routine of checking and rechecking all of his spreadsheets that log purchasing patterns and predict future ones to determine which time should be placed on sale this week. This, he believes, is his real work. He is particularly proud of his finding that when Havarti is on sale people are more likely to purchase smoked turkey from the deli, and so when he needs to push smoked turkey before its expiration date, he has a secret lever to pull. He also has a record of how many watermelons were purchased over the fourth of July weekend every year, and when combined with town population and historical weather data, he is preparing to build the world’s most accurate watermelon-purchasing predictor. 

Bernadette, or Bern as they call her, finds Randall odd on a typical day and maddening on the worst. She is the owner of the store, and while yes, she and the big wigs in corporate do appreciate Randall’s commitment to reducing waste, they are tired of his lengthy emails explaining the dynamics of oatmeal inventory during egg shortages when really, their biggest concerns are just how to beat out the other grocery chains in the land grab for cheapest eggs. Bern comes into the store on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her desk is at the diagonal opposite to Randall’s, and is a tiny altar to the color purple and her two German Shepherds, Lucky and Ricky. The haphazard angles of their photos pinned to her lilac fabric billboard send tingles up Randall’s spine. He once tried to straighten them for her, thinking that she had just not had the time, and that he was doing her a favor. The next day the photos were back to their original positions and a piece of paper was posted on the wall informing all staff of a new policy prohibiting any interference with others’ personal workspaces. Now, Randall does his best to keep his back turned on her desk at all times. 

He opens his dry goods forecasting workbook. Something is off. The inventory he had predicted to be remaining on the shelves by the end of this week was nearly double what it actually is; the counts on kidney beans and spaghetti being particularly low. He checks the numbers and for formulas, and then rechecks them. The only explanation is an error – someone must have logged the inventory wrong. He sighs and pushes back from his desk and returns to the store. 

“Randall!” Abigail yells to him from her cash register as soon as he is in sight. “Cards aren’t going through this morning. Just had to send Mrs. Collins back home empty-handed and now same problem for Tim here.” 

A balding man with a small potbelly that hangs over the top of his waistband scratches his forehead and shrugs at Randall. “Worked yesterday at Ace’s.” He says.

“Do you think it has something to do with the blackouts?” Abigail asks. 

“What blackouts?” Randall replies.

“Up in Vernon.” Merna chimes in from bagging. “They lost power for a couple of hours on Wednesday with no explanation and a couple of other cities farther north did too. It was on the news.

Randall squints to read the faded lettering on Tim’s work-out gray t-shirt and thinks he can make out the word Vesuvius. 

“Tim, where did you get that shirt?” He asks.

Tim shrugs again. “Found it at the VFW yesterday.” 

Randall’s phone buzzes in his pocket. A stream of texts appear from Bern all at once. 

Randall, I will be arriving later than normal this morning. There are power issues at the Mansfield store. 

Please tell Jameson that I’d like to meet with him about next month’s seafood logistics. 

Still held up in Mansfield, power not back. 

Just tried calling the store and all lines busy.

Tried your cell no answer. 

Please try calling me back.

Randall please prepare the store for potential power outages. 

Randall lock the store!!! 

He looks up from his phone to find Abigail, Merna, and Tim all staring at him. He remembers that they are waiting for a decision on the credit card. 

“I can come back with cash.” Tim resigns himself. 

“No, take your food Tim, we know you’re good for it.” Randall replies. 

Abigail’s jaw drops half an inch and she stares at him, her mouth ajar. Randall has never allowed an inventory item to leave the store unaccounted for. Merna obediently places the eggs, bread, and cottage cheese into a brown paper bag. Randall remembers the kidney beans and spaghetti and spins on his heel to aisle seven. The humming of the overhead fluorescent lights grows louder and burns through his ears into the sides of his skull. 

The lights go out. From aisle seventeen, Nanette Rogers lets out a loud gasp which is then followed by the sound of a glass jar of marinara sauce hitting the linoleum floor and shattering across aisle four. Then, there is silence. Randall turns his head to see Isabel Lyons standing frozen, eyes wide, staring at him down the end of the aisle in front of the spice shelves. He recalls learning that when they discovered Pompeii, they found hollowed casts of people in the layers of the ash, completely evaporated in an instant while in the midst of everyday life. He imagines Isabel, terrified with cinnamon, preserved for all eternity. The silence lingers for a full minute, maybe more, before it is interrupted by the winding up of the emergency sirens and the dull roar of a mob approaching from the distance. 

Randall conjures up his inventory sheets from the morning in his mind. There is enough food in the store to last three days before shelves become noticeably empty, with the exception of the bakery. Seven days before the dairy shows a meaningful shortage, and before the majority of the produce goes bad, but then he recalls the morning’s abnormal smells and revises this to two days. Then, he abandons all of these estimates, remembering that they are the predictions that apply to normal shopping patterns, and that this morning everything was off with the beans and spaghetti. He checks his watch and estimates that at this hour there are between fifteen and twenty shoppers in the store. Randall Nowak, a man who has never yelled in his life, bellows from aisle seven, “If you are in the store, grab what you can and run to the back store room. I’m locking the door in three minutes! Leave the strawberries!” He sweeps the remaining kidney beans and spaghetti packages into his arms and runs.