I was so confident in my work that, after every session, I would take each branch’s stack of fraud reports to the shredder and dump them in, the crunching of the paper acting as my final confirmation of mastery over my domain.

It wasn’t until one day some weeks into my accounting career that I noticed, as I was confidently strumming numbers into the fax machine’s dial pad, that a tiny symbol on the document feeder showed a little piece of paper whose corner was folded to show lines of text on the opposite side—a symbol, in other words, to suggest that documents were to be inserted text side down. I had not been inserting my documents text side down. I had been inserting my documents text side up, which meant that each day, when I’d delicately organized my fraud report piles, carried them one by one to the fax machine, placed them finely into the document feeder, effortlessly typed the numbers into the dial pad, and listened seductively as the music of each digit’s tone rang in my ear and the machine buzzed to life, slurping up my papers and spitting them out, emitting a final climactic beep to indicate the transaction was complete, throughout all this time, I’d been faxing the blank side of the paper out into the world and then shredding the originals. Every day, measly accounting associates in local bank branches around the greater Chicagoland area were wondering why in the hell their fax machines were buzzing awake in the middle of the day to spit out blank stacks of paper, and also why they hadn’t been receiving any fresh fraud reports lately and if perhaps we’d simply eradicated fraud altogether but somehow inherited a fax machine virus. I’d been sowing silent chaos for weeks, and I had no idea.

Because I was never entirely sure how important those fraud reports were, I don’t know how much damage I caused by allowing some six weeks of fraud to go uninvestigated, but I should point out for posterity that the bank in question is no longer in business, and I can’t say that I am solely or even partially responsible for that fact, but I also can’t say that I’m not.

For the sake of owning up to my faults and placing responsibility where it belongs, I’d like to say that I absolutely and completely blame Janice for this mistake. It’s obviously possible that she showed me how to use the fax machine correctly on day one, but let’s be real, she probably didn’t. And for that, Janice can never be forgiven. Obviously she should’ve taken greater care to show a young, helpless child like myself that you have to place your stack of precious documents in the fax machine one way or they may never be seen by a person in the world ever again.