Don't know what's missing until it's found (12/27/06)

It was a Friday afternoon when the telephone rang.My sister Louise was on the other end, which caught me by surprise. I'd seen her just a few days before at a meeting of the company's board of directors, and I'd see her again on Christmas."What's up?" I asked.Turns out, there was a problem.As a member of the board, she received a fee. But when she went to her bank in Richmond to make a deposit, the teller - a newly-trained employee - took a hard look at her deposit then told her, "This is not a valid check."Not a valid check? What was he talking about?The name of the bank isn't on the check, Louise told me.That's crazy, I responded. Then I pulled out my own paycheck to take a look.Sure it's there, I was going to say, in the upper right-hand corner where it always is.Except it wasn't there."Omigosh," I said. "Let me see what I can find out."When I called out to Joy, our bookkeeper, she must have thought I was crazy. After all, she'd just done her banking and had deposited her paycheck.But then she looked in the box of checks.Sure enough, none of them had the bank's name on the front.It was a new box, and we'd issued probably 50 to 75 checks from it.Immediately, I had visions of angry vendors and upset employees. Any minute now, I thought, the phone will start ringing with complaints from paper companies, ink companies, insurance companies, utility companies, and more. The list kept getting longer in my head.By now, I was in pretty much panic mode. Evidence of that came when I called the wrong bank to tell them the news; the phone numbers became switched in my head as I thought of all of those invalid checks we'd issued.On the second call, I got the right bank and told them the news. They were as incredulous as I was.But then things got even crazier.Trying to get to the bottom of things, Joy had pulled out bank statements. The checks with no bank name on them came from the last box of a shipment we received this summer.And there, on a statement from August, we saw the bank's name disappear off the checks. It was there in July, but checks issued in August - from the first box of that shipment - had no bank name on them.For months, we'd been sending them out. And for months they'd been cashed, deposited, and accepted.The key, of course, is that the routing numbers along the bottom - that code you and I can't read but computers use to identify banks and accounts - were fine.Within minutes, the bank was in contact with the printers. They were embarrassed, of course, and probably didn't appreciate the irony that a printing company was the customer. And by Monday, we received a box of replacements with the name of the bank right where it should be.But maybe they didn't really need to bother. Out of hundreds of flawed checks we sent out, only my sister's was rejected.Maybe she needs to try a different bank.[[In-content Ad]]