Earlier this week Cricket gave me a cardboard folder of Quickbooks install disks. She wanted me to install it on my computer at home, so I could practice using the software in my off hours.
“Don’t lose these,” she cautioned sternly. “I paid $400 for these, I’ll be really mad if you lose them.”
I took them home and installed Quickbooks Enterprise, because the folder said “install this one to learn about Quickbooks.”
The next day I handed the folder back to Cricket. “Which one did you install?” she asked. I told her. “Oh no, that one’s not going to have what you need. Take them back and install the Accountant version.”
She handed the folder back to me. I put the folder on the shelf next to my purse, so I wouldn’t forget it when I went home.
When I got home, I realized I’d forgotten the folder. I went back up to the church to pick it up.
It wasn’t there. It was not on the shelf where I keep my purse. It wasn’t in or on my desk. It wasn’t in the file cabinet, or the safe, or the cupboards. I asked my office manager if she’d seen it, and she helped me look around for a while.
My best guess is that Cricket noticed it over there tucked away and put it on the desk where I wouldn’t forget it, and then gathered it up with her papers by accident when she left. Because nobody else goes in the office, and when I’m not there it’s locked.
So now I’m going to spend the weekend freaking out about losing the disks, after Cricket explicitly cautioned me not to lose the disks, and I was very careful to keep them with my purse at all times (at home and at work) so I’d always know where they were, and now Cricket will be mad at me and I really want Cricket to like me, and maybe at the end of my 90-day probation she’ll tell them not to hire me after all since I went and lost her valuable disks and am therefore probably not trustworthy with the church’s money either, and that would suck because I really like this job.
Oh yeah, the kicker? While I was turning the place upside down looking, I found the church’s copy of Quickbooks in a cupboard, which I could have taken home instead if I’d known about it, and had plenty of time to find it again if it went missing.