If I was in your predicament, I would say something alongside the lines of "Thank you so much for your concern, but since I've gotten the approval of doing markout for the donations by our District Manager I'm going to start on xxx date and donations will be ready for pick up on xxx."

I think it's weird that he wants you to go through him to contact your proxy when you can just directly contact the proxy.

To be fair to him, SMs do usually leave one of the SSVs as the main contact point within the store so there's still a point person, while the proxy SM is mostly just keeping an eye on the admin work. However, if you weren't informed that X person is the point person for the store while the SM is gone, it's a good bet that this person is just trippin'. In which case I'd respond with "hey! thanks for checking in but \[DM\] signed off on this already so I'm all set!"

Kill 'im with kindness, basically. Pretend he's engaging in good faith and it will probably shut down the ego with minimal drama. Because what's he gonna say after that? "No, you have to do it MY way!" Okay buddy. Thanks for the input. Gonna proceed as planned.

I'd just ignore him, or at least his texts. If he says something at work, you can feel free to say, "I have approval, thank you" then walk away.

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