The Story - part 4

Then George saw his boss hand the report to the man with the dark coat.

He watched as the man read the flipped the cover page and read through the first pages. George grimaced waiting for the man to mention the error. He couldn’t imagine how embarrassed his boss was about to be. His boss had never yelled at him before, but being embarrassed in front of the customer may be just the thing that pushes him that far.

The man continued reading for a bit and then a broad smile came across his face. He looked up at George’s boss and they exchanged a few words. George couldn’t hear them clearly, but he could see the man mouth the word “excellent”. The man and his boss shook hands and turned and walked in opposite directions.

George almost fell over himself trying jump back out of view before his boss saw him. He ran down the hallway to his office again and looked out the window at the parking lot, trying to spot the man going out to his car. Shortly, the man emerged from the building and headed for the gate – and the trash can. George watched as he approached the can.

The man stopped right next to the can and held the report out as if he was going to drop it in, but froze in that position for a moment, as if he were reconsidering. Then he flipped the cover page over again and briefly scanned the first page which contained the error. George watched curiously, wondering why the man was hesitating. Eventually, the man flipped the cover page back over and tossed the report into the trash, just like before, and headed into the parking lot.

George sat back down in his seat and thought about all that had just happened. The report clearly had a glaring error, yet neither his boss nor the customer had made any comment about it. If the customer had indeed seen the error, he didn’t say anything to George’s boss. If his boss had seen the error, he would not have handed it to the customer. Yet, it did not seem likely that they would miss an error like that.

The entire situation set George’s mind to thinking for the rest of the week. At first, he went back and checked his previous reports for the past 3 months to see if other errors had gotten past him, but he found none. He even reread his most recent report to see if perhaps he had read it wrong, which of course he had not. This still left him with the question of why nobody noticed the error.

George decided he would do a test. It was risky, but the results would be worth seeing. He would intentionally put a mistake in the next report and see if his boss catches it. If his boss does not, he can simply stop him before he gives the report to the customer, since George will be standing right there. If he does catch it, George will simply make the correction and no harm will be done. It seemed harmless enough, but George still felt a slight twinge of guilt. Slight.

The next day, after he had finished his report, George searched for the best place to put the error. He didn’t want it so subtle that it would be easily missed, but didn’t want it to be so overt that it raised suspicions. Finally, he found a place which read “column 35 clearly indicates…” which George changed to read “column 35 dearly indicates…”. George was pretty pleased with his choice and even grinned a bit to himself as he printed out the pages.

He gathered up the report and walked down the hall to his boss’s office.

“Here’s today’s report.” he said, setting it down lightly on the desk.

His boss picked it up and scanned through it. George waited nervously as his boss read through the page with the implanted error. He seemed to be scanning over one section more than once. Then, his brow began to wrinkle a bit, a look of puzzlement came across his face, and his mouth dropped into a small frown as he looked up at George.

to be continued…

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