drive thru accounting

Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee worked for a while in a drive thru bottleshop. the kind where cars roll up slow, engines idling, windows half down, and everyone already smells like friday night. once a month there was late inventory. after dark. just shelves of booze, a clipboard, and fluorescent lights doing their best impression of the sun. she put her hand up to do it. one of the managers looked her over, took a drag from his cigarette, knocked back a mouthful of jack daniels, and said nah mate, girls can’t count. he said this while trying to light a smoke that was already lit. she blinked once. looked at the clipboard. looked at the shelves. looked back at the bloke who had forgotten what day it was twice that shift. righto, she said. no worries. so he did the inventory himself. watching him was like watching a live experiment in creative accounting. cartons counted twice. bottles missed completely. numbers written down that had clearly been invented on the spot. by the end of it the clipboard looked like it had been filled out during mild turbulence. she just kept running the till. kept the place tidy. quietly clocked exactly how many bottles went missing every month. funny how often they matched his breaks. a week later the owner asked why stock was always out. the manager blamed the computer. the computer never touched the jack daniels. years later she still laughs about that job. not because of what he said. because of how perfectly the whole thing played out. a man with a pack a day habit and a permanent glass of bourbon explaining the limits of human arithmetic. drive thru bottleshop. late night stocktake. wrong numbers. right punchlines. some places teach you maths. that place taught her why she loves being an aussie, and the grog that comes with it maatteee.