My printer Tom is a wonderful guy. Not only has he given me top quality, but reasonable prices on printing Wet Goddess, and the only reason I don’t mention his last name or the name of his business is that I don’t want him taking flack from any other clients (or even, say, his minister if he’s a churchgoing guy) for publishing my controversial work. In fact, I didn’t even name him in the book’s info page until this last printing.
I approached Tom quite early in the process, long before I had the manuscript ready for publication, to sound out his feeling about publishing a human-dolphin romance novel. He wasn’t opposed to it, which was encouraging. I wanted to use him for two reasons: 1) I believe philosophically in using local suppliers whenever possible, 2) no shipping charges – or rather, the shipping charges were merely a little more mileage on my already well-amortized 1997 truck. Tom’s shop is just on the way to the local Wal-Mart, as it happens! 
So imagine my surprise when I walked into Tom’s office last week to pick up the latest press run of 50 copies of my novel, presented Tom with a money order for what I thought was the balance due, only to be told I owed the balance in full – roughly twice as much as what I was handing him.
I gulped. Not that Tom was angry or anything, he was quite pleasant about it. But I was equally certain that my balance due payment was all I owed him. ”Let me check this with my bookkeeper, if you don’t hear back from me, everything is OK,” Tom said cheerfully, and I left with my order, which he helped carry out to my truck. Driving off I swallowed a lump in my throat. But I didn’t hear anything later that day, so I slept well.
Yesterday, the phone rang. ”Malcolm, this is Tom. I went over this with my bookkeeper, she’s my wife, and you still owe me another $150.”
That would just about wipe out a life-saving $200 loan I’d just gotten from a generous and well-employed friend. I literally felt my heart starting to pound, but I said “Tom, I’ll be down there to settle this” in a very upbeat tone and got off the phone. I felt sick, but I knew I was in the right. The question was, how to break it to Tom that his accountant (who remember is HIS WIFE) has made a minor boo-boo, as it were?
Now, I am admittedly the world’s worst bookkeeper, and I make no pretense otherwise, but I am also an obsessive-compulsive character type, which helps me to save things like invoices. So I was able to pull every invoice Tom had given me this year. Then, by going to my bank’s web site, I was able to pull up and print out photocopies of the accompanying checks. Thus I assembled a catalogue of each order and its accompanying payment or, in the more recent instances, payments, for this is where we had gone wrong.
I was very, very diplomatic. ”Malcolm, I’m not trying to screw you out of anything,” Tom said as we shook hands. ”I know that, Tom,” I said, “and I’m prepared to settle up, but before I do that can we spend a couple of minutes going over some records?”
“Sure,” he said. Long story short, after consulting first my records, then his own records, Tom realized that what he had thought was two orders was in fact really one, stretched out over a month because he was busy right before Christmas. ”You might be right,” he finally said, “Let me photocopy all your documents.” So he did. And now I’m waiting to hear back, fingers crossed… because right after I got done with Tom yesterday, I ran down to Wal-Mart and spent most of it as quickly as I could on mailing envelopes for the book and other minor niceties, like food. Stay tuned and I’ll let you know how this plays out.
