Check The Checking For Checks

(My boss tends to assign me a bunch of random tasks throughout the day, many of which are given to me in the form of a forwarded email, which means a lot of extra work for me to simply have to figure out what he even wants me to do.)

Boss: “Hey, I need you to get me the phone number of the person that wanted to sell us this item. [Coworker] spoke to him on the phone yesterday, but forgot to get his phone number.”

Me: “Okay, what’s his name?”

Boss: “I don’t know. But we’ve done business with him before. We wrote him a $1,100 check last month… Or maybe the month before. Just search for that amount in our checkbook and then find the customer’s phone number for me.”

Me: “Um… So, you don’t actually know the customer’s name?”

Boss: “Don’t talk back! Just find it!”

Me: *facepalm*

(Long story short, I spent over an hour searching through our MULTIPLE checkbooks, through hundreds of checks, to find two checks written for that exact amount. Both were to companies and not an actual person. This lead to an entire day of being forced to go through our entire customer database to try to find the information on a customer whose name I couldn’t be told. When I finally found the correct customer, they had already sold the item we wanted to buy, which, of course, my boss blamed on me.)