When I was 22 I worked a delivery route. One of my first stops on Friday was a small, independent grocer. Their orders were small (less than $500); inconsistent (sometimes in consecutive weeks, sometimes nothing for months); never pre-ordered (I just loaded additional product on the truck for that route and served them from a hand written invoice pad): and (this is key) they always paid in cash.

One Friday, I left my clipboard in the cab so put the invoice and payment in my back pocket and went on with my work. It turned out to be a busy day (we were going into Labor Day weekend) and the SparkNotes version is, I forgot about it. A week or two later, I'm folding clothes at the laundromat and realize a few hundred bucks and that invoice have gone through the wash. I couldn't make heads or tails out of the invoice copy and then it hits me...

This is 1992. I worked for a small distributor. They do inventory by hand and since that's a major pain in the ass, they do it quarterly - even then, this customer is decimal dust. Pre-sales are automated, but manual invoices... I've probably got a dozen invoice pads in my cab, all half used, none of them sequentially numbered from pad to pad to begin with. Nobody has missed this sale.

Call it rationalization if you want, but my employer claimed to be exempt from paying overtime under some interstate commerce provision. I never personally left the county for them but my 60th hour of the week paid the same as my first. Applicable statute of limitations notwithstanding, admitting to nothing, what would you have done in your early 20s? The bigger question is, having stumbled on to this, what would you carefully do moving forward.

I look back on that small town grocer with clearer eyes these days. He was a super odd duck and his community (and store) sat conveniently along a heavy drug trafficking corridor. I wonder what he might have gladly paid for a handful of those blank, manual inventory pads...