Anxiety

Thirty cents.

That’s all it took to ruin my day.

Reconciling the bank statements at my office is not simple, especially for the main account with its numerous transactions.  And it’s time-consuming, so I am delighted when I can quickly check off everything via QuickBooks and get that desired balance of zero.

But today, there was a difference of thirty cents.

Thirty. Measly. Cents.

Poop.

I went back through every deposit, studying the numbers to the right of the decimals.  Then I went through every check and debit listed.  Every single one.

No discrepancy anywhere.

That’s when I noticed in the reconciliation screen that the beginning balance was thirty cents different from the amount shown on the bank statement.

How could that be?

I pulled out last month’s reconciliation.  It was correct, with an ending balance matching the beginning balance on the new bank statement.

Somehow, since that last reconciliation, an entry in QuickBooks had been changed by thirty cents.

I began poring through last month’s entries and finally found it.

It was a deposit that, for some reason, had been adjusted.

By thirty cents.

Don’t know why, don’t remember doing it.

I changed it back.

I’m not sure how much time this took.  Between answering phones, helping people that come into my office, and my other accounting duties, it’s hard to pinpoint the amount of time any one activity takes.  I just know it took far too much time, at least twice the time it normally takes for me to do a reconciliation.

Totally unacceptable.

I want to do things one time, and I want to do them right.  Then be done with them.

I really like checking things off my To-Do list.  The faster, the better.

It gives me a feeling of closure, a feeling of competence.

When I can’t check off something, it feels like loose ends flapping in the breeze, movement in the periphery of my mind that refuses to let me rest.

That’s how the thirty cents made me feel.

Thirty cents.

Anxiety defined.