Everyone turned toward the entrance as I walked in, and I had a manila folder in my hand with three pieces of paper in it, and it took about six minutes.
Nobody stole those batteries. Nobody ever had them.
Here is how a county garage works. Parts come in on a truck from the vendor with a packing slip. Somebody signs that slip, the parts go on the shelf, and the invoice comes later out of the vendor’s office and goes to the county auditor to be paid. Two pieces of paper for the same delivery, written by two different people, four days apart.
I have matched those two pieces of paper on every delivery to that garage since 1996, because the fellow who trained me got burned once in the eighties and he told me never to trust an invoice.
The invoice for that order says twelve batteries. The packing slip says twelve batteries too, printed.
But the count on the shelf that morning was six, and the driver’s handheld receipt — the little curled ticket he leaves stapled to the slip, which nobody ever looks at, and which I have kept in a folder for twenty-nine years — shows six scanned off that truck.
Six loaded, twelve billed. And when the auditor’s office pulled the previous nine months of deliveries from that vendor, it was not the first time. It was the eleventh.
The vendor’s driver had a side business and a printer. He had been short-loading county orders for the better part of a year and selling the rest, and it worked because in most shops nobody counts and nobody keeps the little curled ticket.
The commissioners had the auditor read out the totals. It came to just over nine thousand dollars across the year, and the county got it back, and there are charges filed in Potter County.
My new supervisor sat in a folding chair through all of it. When it was over he stood up and apologized to me in front of everybody, and he had the sense not to explain himself, and I respect him a little for that.
The county judge asked to see my folder afterward and turned it over in her hands like it was something.
Thirty-two years of little curled tickets nobody asked you to keep. This county owes you nine thousand dollars and an apology, and the apology is the part I’m ashamed about.
They gave me my master key back and eight days of pay. There’s a written procedure now — count the load against the driver’s ticket before you sign, and staple all three together — and the fellows call it the Old Man Rule, which I pretend not to like.
Doors open at four-thirty. Coffee’s on before anybody gets there.