Le Sigh.

I screwed up at work today. This doesn't happen very often. If you don't believe me, look up at the name of my blog. But when I do make a mistake, it's often huge, colossal, gigantic. Enter today.

We had our annual cheerleading banquet in March, with all of the usual costs and whatnot. Reserving a room at a pricey country club, DJ, decorations....you know, the essentials. One of our parents generously took care of all of the costs and sent me the bill so we could just write one check instead of ten. I'm in charge of the money for cheerleading, and I've been worried for awhile about the balance of our funds. We had to borrow money from the PTV (Parent-Teacher Volunteers, for those not familiar with school-speak) in order to pay our competition fees in January, and we were down to owing them slightly more than $800. We should have had plenty of money from the tickets we sold for banquet to cover the costs of that event, plus we do a daily fundraiser to generate the money to pay our debts. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: we sell beef jerky and water in our classes. You would not BELIEVE how much money we make off of this. It's like the children are starved at home, with the way they pack away the jerky.

Anyway...long story short, I hadn't paid the DJ yet for banquet. I was worried we wouldn't have the money, so I kept putting it off. We know the DJ personally (he is related to one of our cheerleaders), so I just set it aside with the understanding that we'd get to it as soon as we paid back PTV. Yeah, wrong choice. He called the administration office today. For those of you that haven't been in school for a while, the admin. office is like the White House to a school district. You speak in hushed tones while inside, always on the lookout for someone *important* to walk by. And you NEVER want them to know that you messed up. Sigh.

The DJ called admin., thinking it was a problem on their end. The administrative assistant in payroll called MY administrative assistant and got mad at her, thinking that she had lost the check request somewhere along the way. Granted, this has happened before with our AA, so it wasn't completely off-base for the admin. office to assume this, but they were wrong this time. It wasn't her fault, since she never received the check request from yours truly. My AA calls me, frantically trying to figure out if she has indeed misplaced it. I considered for approximately 3 seconds being a horrible person and letting the blame fall on her shoulders, but fortunately my mother raised a child with a very loud conscience. I told her that it was my fault and explained my reasoning. She was extremely understanding, I came down to her office, and we fixed the problem. The DJ is getting his check ASAP, and the cheerleading fund will not be depleted of all funds. So all is well. Sort of. I keep dwelling on it, wondering if this all could have been avoided if I had just gone to our AA and explained the situation, blah blah blah. I just hate making mistakes. I know that no one likes to make them, but I'm especially hard on myself, more than anyone else.

Sigh. I'll try for perfection again tomorrow.