Charlotte

 After Belk closed all of their stores in Columbia, I was out of work.  In looking around, I found a company that wanted to hire me.  It was Prudential Insurance.  They liked my ability to sell.  So, I went to their orientation and found out quickly that this was not the place for me.  They wanted me to sell insurance, mostly to my friends and family.  That was the first strike.  They also wanted me to go through the phone book and make cold calls to people.  That was the second strike.  The third strike came, when they informed me that I would not get a commission from the sale for the first year.  A mentor would basically get the money I had worked for.  I would be paid enough to pay for rent and gas.  I never went back.
 I was needing money for rent.  I saw an ad in the paper for someone in a marketing firm.  That sounded doable.  I went to their office in my three-piece suit and found it was a telemarketing place, and all of the women on the phones were in shorts and t-shirts.  I was very overdressed a d walked out of the door.
 Then, one day the phone rang.  It was my old Belk store manager, Phil, wanting to know if I wanted to help them close the books on the stores.  He said the former warehouse manager, Don, was going to do it, and he needed someone familiar with Accounts Payable.  So, I said yes.  The job was in Charlotte at the headquarters for the Belk family that owned our stores.  We had a van, and we left the Columbia Mall parking lot every morning at 7:30 and drove to Charlotte to be up there by 9:30.  The offices were on Tyvola across from South Park Mall.  When we got there, we had all of the held invoices and the stock receipts in several boxes.  We would take a receipt and match it to an invoice.  We would check to see if they matched.  Once that was reconciled, we would send that invoice to be paid.  We sometimes could only pay partial invoices, which usually meant a call from a vendor when they got their check.  We would try to get out of the office to return home by 3:30-4:00 to avoid the rush hour traffic.  If we didn't, we wouldn't get back to Columbia until 7:30-8:00.  That happened some at first.
 Charlotte has a lot of nice restaurants.  We tried to go to a different one each day, since Belk was paying for it.  One reason we would go to a different one was that Don had bad luck with some of them.  Either he got sick on the food or get hurt.  One time, he bit into a sandwich that had a staple in the meat.  He cut his lip, and it wouldn't stop bleeding.  Our food was free that day.
 We also would go up in all kinds of weather.  It snowed twice.  We braved the snowy roads one day, but the other we turned back before we got to Rock Hill.  Our safety seemed kind of important.  Another thing we did was stop for gas along the way on I-77.  We stopped at all of the gas stations at least twice and got to know the workers inside.  They got to know us too.
 The job was starting to last longer than we had planned.  We were supposed to take 3 months to close the books.  We weren't anywhere near that to finishing, so we started a new plan.  Pay the invoices without checking the stock receipts, as long as it was not over $10,000 each,  We started okaying checks like crazy.  We even joked that we could issue ourselves $10,000 checks without authorization and no one would no.  Of course, we never did that.  Too bad.
 We finished up our job in February 1996.  We had started just after Thanksgiving in 1995.  The books were closed, and we went home.  Phil got a job as a Belk store manager in Orangeburg.  Don got a job at a bank.  I was still looking at the want ads.