Receipts

 On a Sunday night, a guy was riding his bicycle not far from his house.  He went around a corner rather fast, and a car hit him.  The force was so great that he flew into a tree.  As he lay dying on the ground, the first car that arrived on the scene was a woman who knew the man from church.  She knew how to get in touch with his mother.  An ambulance came and took him to the hospital, where he died.  The man worked at Belk in the warehouse, which had moved from downtown out to Columbia Mall.  I had known this man for a long time.  It was very sad.
 Upon hearing the news of his death, our store manager called me into his office and offered me the job of this guy.  I was interested, but I told the manager that I would have to think about it and decide after he was buried.  I thought it was out of respect for the deceased.  After leaving the burial service, I was walking with the store manager and told him I would take the job.
 The job was to check merchandise receipts against the purchase journals, which determined whether the inventory was more or less what was supposed to be in the store.  This helped the buyers and finance folks know how much inventory we had at any given time.  I also had to investigate if there seemed to be a major discrepancy.  When an item came into the warehouse, it was counted by the clerks in the warehouse.  They would put price tags on them and send them to the floor.  The sales associates would note on the receipt what the count was and turn the receipt back to the warehouse.  I would then get that receipt and compare it to what was ordered.  It was tedious but necessary.  I would then take the receipt to accounts payable, where they would compare the receipt to the invoice and then pay it accordingly.  I had an office off of the warehouse floor.  I brought my cassette player/radio with me, and jammed to music while I worked.  I could also wear jeans and casual shirts, because I was no longer directly dealing with the public.  Because my predecessor had died, there was really no one to show me how to do my work.  I settled into it okay.  Another big plus was that the warehouse closed on holidays, so I got Memorial Day and Labor Day off.  Sales people were not so fortunate.
 As I controlled the inventory numbers and checked behind the buyers, there was a time when it got bad.  I was approached by the store higher-ups to find a reason to fire one of the buyers.  They didn't like one of the woman buyers, but they couldn't find a reason to fire her.  They came to me and told me to find that reason.  I poured over all of her purchase orders.  Everything seemed okay.  I did find one order where the markup she had done was not quite up to what it should have been.  She had put the markup at 40%, when it should have been more like 60%.  I went to the managers to show them that order, and they used it to fire her.  I felt very badly about it, but it was part of my job.  A few years later, she and I worked at another store.  She had not known that it was me that found this mistake that got her fired.  She was very cordial to me.  I didn't have the heart to tell her the truth.
 I stayed at this job for a couple of years, until I was promoted to the Accounts Payable Department.  More on that later.