I should have gone out to eat, but it’s not much fun by yourself. It also didn’t take that long to do.

Today was inventory day at my odd little ink reselling business. I have a bunch of product to move and I needed to list the inventory so that I could offer it to people with the ultimate goals being 1) making a little money and 2) getting it all off my floor.

All this reminded me of inventory day at Taco Tico. (Note: I am not responsible for their bankruptcy/failure to pay taxes although my management skills, quite frankly, did not help the situation.)

One of my jobs as shift manager was to control the outflow of napkins (servilletes to those in Europe) and paper products. The main rule, if I remember correctly, was that, although Taco Tico had a more “family” style, with food served on regular plates rather than in cartons, napkins were only available on request. This is because when we handed them one or two napkins, customers would accept that. When facing a napkin dispenser or a stack of napkins, however, customers would take half the available supply.

This seems like a minor thing, however, once a month the store manager and the area manager would take over the restaurant after closing and count everything in it The napkin rules came about after they decide that napkins were disappearing too quickly. They then presented a complicated mathematical formula that was supposed to prove this but I just said “Sure, yeah, control napkins. I get it”).

After the inventory, which took a few hours, they always went to a truck stop for a middle of the night breakfast. At one point the area manager implied that I would one day be involved in the counting. I assured him, in so many words, that wasn’t my style.

Instead I ended up counting ink bottles and trying to figure out how to get them off my floor. And there was no breakfast after.