Reflections on the Fifth Week of Winter – Finding the Balance

Calculator on Quilt

    In an 1850s farm house on our snowy Tuesday afternoon, I settled at the kitchen table between two women I’d briefly met to start a job I’d never done. To succeed as a French Creek Township auditor, I needed to build the trust of the women and learn the job. At least we had a friend in common–Peggie, the quilter who’d talked me into to taking her auditing position. “Did you hear Peggie broke her ribs?”

    Nancy, owner of the farm house, retired substitute teacher, and auditor for twenty three years, gasped. “Ouch!”

    Eyes widening, Joan, retired school bus driver and auditor for five years, asked, “How’d Peggie break them?”

    “She reached for a package of meat at the bottom of her garage freezer, fell, and cracked her ribs on the freezer’s side.”

    Joan grabbed her ribs. “That’s so painful. I broke mine years back.”

    “Tell Peggie we’re thinking of her.” Nancy said.

    After Nancy asked if we were comfortable with the room temperature, she stood and tapped her pencil on a stack of folders. “We’re here to make sure all expenditures have a reasonable price and purpose. No secret trips to Hawaii. We also need to make everything balance.” She selected two folders from the stack. “You girls can start with the general revenue fund.” Nancy handed me a thin folder. “These records organize revenues by month.” She reached across the table to give Joan a thicker folder. “These are the same revenues organized by account.” She waved her pencil between Joan and me. “The accounts should add up to the same amount. Try adding the subtotals from each page to see if the two accounts balance. It could save some time.” She sat down and opened two folders. “I’ll work on the state revenue.”

    Taking a deep breath, I tapped numbers into my calculator.

    Beside me, Joan wrote numbers in her notebook and added them. Ten minutes later we compared grand totals–two thousand eight hundred dollars apart.

    “Okay. That didn’t save time.” Nancy stepped behind me. Running her finger down a column she said, “You’ll have to add this column on each page to see if the subtotals are correct.” She stepped behind Joan. “Add the amounts for each entry to check subtotals.”

    The blower on the furnace hummed, and we hunched over folders.

    At the bottom of the first page, I said, “This is off by ten cents. What should I do?”

    Following Nancy’s instructions, I selected a blue pencil, noted the correct amount on the side, and wrote minus ten cents at the bottom of the page. I turned the page and kept adding.

    Nancy’s cat padded behind us on his way to the kitty litter in the laundry room.

    “These numbers don’t match,” Nancy mumbled to herself. “Where did she get them?”

    I assumed “she” referred to Sherian, the township supervisor who kept the books.

    “Shit.” Joan said.

    Nancy and I laughed.

    “Oh, sorry.” Joan’s face reddened. “I don’t really talk like that, but something’s wrong.”

    Two hours later, The totals for Joan’s account revenue and my monthly revenue differed by a little more than a thousand dollars.

    “Okay. You’ll have to verify that the numbers match for each transaction.” Nancy pointed her pencil from Joan’s folder to mine. “One of you read to the other. Check the account numbers, dates, and amounts.”

   Joan raised her eyebrows at me. “Do you want to read to me?”

    “No. Your stack of papers is much thicker.” I held up my set. “I only have twelve pages to flip through.”

    Joan nodded. “March third, account three hundred one point one, four hundred thirty-seven dollars and twenty-six cents.”

    “Right.”

    But they weren’t all right. Sherian recorded seven for nine several times.

    Halfway through the revenues, I read to Joan. “One five three zero point two seven.” Numbers blurred. I looked up at the calendar on the wall and blinked to clear my vision. “Two six seven point zero two.”

    After three and a half hours sitting on the hard wooden chairs, Joan and I only differed by seven hundred eighty-seven dollars.

    I looked at Nancy. “What happens if we can’t get it to balance?”

    “We work until they do balance.” She looked at her watch. “My state revenues aren’t balancing either. Go home now. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

    Sunny Wednesday afternoon, Joan smoothed her Cochranton High School sweatshirt over her abdomen and said, “I woke thinking about the number ‘one thousand five hundred and four.’ That’s got to be it.”

    I hung my sweater on the back of the chair. “I woke thinking we just had to match the numbers against each other again.” I sat and pulled the chair in so that Nancy and Joan could walk behind me to get to the files on the counter. “One of them has to be off.”

    With bags under her eyes and a pale complexion, Nancy stood at the head of the table with the revenue folders in her hands. “I pulled an all-nighter and found the error. You had checked off one amount that didn’t match.” She set the folders on the table, flipped the top one open, and selected a page. “You matched a number in the thousands to one in the hundreds.”

    Oops. I remembered the blurry numbers and reading digits instead of number names. But we’d have caught the mistake on a second attempt.

    “And I got the state revenues to balance.” Nancy tucked the files into an empty carton on top of the counter next to the bowl of apples then put her hand on a full carton of files. “Today you can work on expenditures. Pick a month of bills from here. Match the bills to the expenditure accounts.” She handed us a file with monthly expenditure pages. “Make sure the amounts are reasonable and watch for a secret trip to Hawaii.”

    I grabbed the January file and handed February to Joan. With check stubs between us, we studied bills.

    Anti-skid, gasoline, truck repairs, mileage, vehicle parts, and a diamond. “Diamond?” Had I found an unreasonable expenditure?

    Nancy dropped her pencil.

   Joan dropped the stubs.

    “Oh, a diamond bit drill.”

    We laughed, and bent over our work.

    Later, in the April folder, the post office bill read $98.00 for two rolls of stamps, but Sherian had recorded $94.00. “I found a discrepancy, Nancy.”

    She got up to look over my shoulder.

    I pointed to the bill then the entry.

    “Look at the checkbook to see what she actually paid.”

    I flipped through the stubs. “The bill is right.”

    “Okay. Correct the amount in the space to the side, put plus four at the bottom of the page, and write in the new total below hers.”

    Thankful for experience editing and balancing my own accounts, I followed Nancy’s directions and flipped to the next bill.

    Later, Joan and I compared totals.

    A perfect match.

    Empowered, I balanced the general checking account making blue dots and printing corrections. Feeling like an auditor, I dictated the balance to Nancy then looked up at the clock. Twenty after five. “Yikes.” We’d been working four hours and twenty minutes. “I have to go. I need to eat dinner and leave by six for the quilt meeting.”

    “Don’t worry about the papers. I’ll clean up.” Nancy waved me away from the table. “Just go.”

    Friday, when Joan and I settled into our chairs, Nancy held a report and stood at the head of the table. “Yesterday, I took all your numbers and put them into the twenty page auditor report.” She flipped through the report showing form after form with a few numbers on each page. “Whichever one of you found that four dollar difference made the best catch. That would have been hard for me to reconcile.” Nancy put the report in a folder and pulled out a single piece of paper. “Now look over this summary sheet. Everything balances.” She handed me the paper.

    I glanced at the page. If Nancy said the numbers balanced, that was good enough for me. I handed the page to Joan.

    After studying the sheet, Joan set it on the table and tapped one line. “You forgot to change the date. It should read two thousand seventeen not two thousand fifteen.”

    “Darn.” Nancy scrunched her forehead. “I’ll have to print it over again. But that was the last sheet of clean paper I had.”

    I shrugged. Just change a five to a seven? “Use white out.”

    Nancy pulled back her shoulders. “No. That’s not neat enough for me. It’s got to be perfect. Maybe I can find another sheet somewhere.” She turned to the door then turned back to pointed to a carton on the counter. “There are twelve more folders to look through. Work on them while I fix this.”

    We read through files, added columns of numbers, and verified totals. No mention of a secret trip to Hawaii.

    Nancy came back. “I found a clean sheet of paper. Are you done with the files?”

    Joan shut the book of township meeting notes. “Might as well be. I was at all the meetings. There’s nothing new here.”

    “Sign this paper. I’m requesting fifteen hours for each of us at ten dollars an hour.” Fifteen hours? If I added the time spent filling out and notarizing forms in December, the hour organizing meeting on January 3, and the twelve plus hours working this week, that totaled about fifteen. But Nancy had put in hours and hours between work sessions with Joan and me. “Can’t you give us ten hours and you twenty? You worked way longer than we did.”

    Nancy shook her head. “It’s got to be fifteen for each of us.”

    I signed and handed the paper to Joan.

    She pursed her lips and folded her arms against her chest.

   “Sign it, Joan.” Nancy put her hands on the table and leaned toward Joan. “We’re saving the township lots of money. They’d have to pay a professional auditor thousands.”

    “I’d rather just volunteer the time–do my part for the community,” Joan said.

    Nancy put her hands on her hips. “Don’t make me do a lot of paperwork just because you don’t want to sign.”

    I looked from one woman to the other. “Sign it to support Nancy, Joan.”

    Joan signed.

    Nancy whisked the paper into a folder. “Okay. We’ll go to Sherian’s to finish this. Let’s go in your truck, Joan. Sherian’s driveway isn’t plowed.”

    At Sherian’s, Joan and I sat in cushioned roller chairs at a kitchen island in Sherian’s open space living area. Nancy and Sherian disappeared into the den so Nancy could type the report into the state’s auditor program.

    While I gazed through the window at snowy trees in the woods and Nancy gazed at Sherian’s family photos, we chatted. She and her husband Tim were a lot like Spence and me.

• They started as weekenders.
• They lived in a log house.
• They didn’t have grandchildren but enjoyed great nieces and nephews.
• They wouldn't go back to living in a city.

    “The suburbs are so crowded.” Joan tucked her arms and legs in as if preparing to squeeze through a tight spot.

    “I hate all the traffic lights when I drive in town,” I said.

    Joan leaned toward me. “I know what you mean. Here I can get to Walmart with only one red light. There . . .” She shook her arms as if facing an evil specter.

    Nancy’s voice floated in from the den. “Yeah!”

    Joan and I giggled.

    “The report must have gone through,” Joan said. “We’re almost done.”

    Nancy returned with a sprightly step, a peachy glow on her face, and a smile that sparkled in her eyes. “The report was accepted. We just have two more forms to sign.”

    Back home, I wondered about the fifteen hour division of time. Did the law really say we had to work equal time together?

    I called Nancy Saturday morning.

   “No,” she said over the phone. “I could have taken four hundred forty-eight dollars and left two for you and Joan. But, when I first started the job, the pay was kept equal. I want to keep it that way.”

    “You put in more hours than we did. It would be fine if you got more money.”

    “No. I couldn’t do the work without you girls,” and she changed the subject to her husband going to a gun show and asking me about my Philadelphia flower show trip. A half hour later we said goodbye. Her last words? “Be comfortable with your money.”

    I hung up the phone and exhaled. What a week.

• Match sums and reconcile differences.
• Develop skills and nurture friendships.
• Take initiative and follow directions.

    I eased off the teeter-totter week of balancing and looked forward to working with Nancy and Joan next January.