"Good work!"
The bookkeeper's reply was two words and an exclamation point. It might be the most quietly devastating email I've ever received.
For six weeks I'd been chasing a payment. The insurer said it had reissued a returned wire. It never seemed to arrive. Letter one went out in late August. Letter two in early September. Letter three I wrote from a plastic chair between two flights, jet-lagged and furious, the firmest letter of the set. I was a little proud of that one.
Hours after I landed, the insurer answered. "The payment was issued to your bank." No date. No trace number. Call the number on the back of your card.
Six weeks for a shrug.
I forwarded it to our bookkeeper with no comment. Just the shrug, passed along like a hot potato.
She did the one thing I hadn't. She checked.
Two hours later: "Checked, the money arrived August 6. Good work!"
August 6.
My first chase letter went out August 27. Three weeks after the money landed. Every letter I'd written, including the proud one from the airport chair, had chased a wire that was already home.
Three letters. Zero looks at the one place money actually goes.
And that "Good work!" I know what it's worth. It's what you say to the man who brought a flashlight into a lit room.
The old shop ran this play every single day, from both sides of the desk.
There was a merchant who owned a car wash. Every morning at 9:01, he called about his funding wire. Where is it? Who signed? Escalate me. He kept a notebook of every call, every name, every time. He had a trail that photographed like diligence.
On day eleven, I asked him, very gently, if he'd looked at his business account.
Silence on the line.
"The business account?" He said. "I've been checking my personal."
The wire had been sitting in his business account for ten days.
Chasing has verbs in it. Letters, timestamps, a trail that looks like hard work. Checking is one boring look. And the look might end the story, and some part of us likes the story. It gives us someone to be mad at.
The fix was never a fourth letter. It was one look from the person who has the books.
That night I opened my notes and found the draft of letter number four. Already written. Addressed. Ready to go, firmer still than the airport one.
I read it once, start to finish, enjoying every sentence.
Then I deleted it, and typed one line to the bookkeeper.
"Thank you. Anything else I'm chasing that's already home?"
Confessions is a series of stories from inside the MCA world. Names and details are changed, and some are dramatized.
