The Big Potato Caper

After a special day with a visit from a fascinating younger relation, I achieved an unusually long night of slumber. Having had nearly the prescribed eight hours with none of the regular trips to the adjoining chamber, I was obviously ready to be roused. It is in that strange mittelgeist period approaching wakefulness when this old man is never sure what unique creatures or sensations may populate his unconsciousness and leave a stream of its unreality with him when fully awake.

This time there was a rather staid young man of sincere demeanour dressed somewhat in the Edwardian manner of the early twentieth century. He claimed the name of Stirling Hepplesmith and exhibited great pride in achieving the degree of Chartered Public Accountant at the nearby Piddlington School of Business.

Hepplesmith had taken rather longer than his more brilliant contemporaries to complete the prescribed course but the Dean of Accountancy at Piddlington recommended him for what he thought a suitable position with Bishop and Bullard, Accountants, in the small New England town of Hexburg. The firm specialized in offering accounting services to Hexburg’s small retailers like restaurants, shoe repairers, bars, haberdashers, lawyers and other professionals who served Hexburg and its thriving rural area. The dean suggested that Hepplesmith, with his slow but careful attention to detail, would be suited to the conduct of the annual audits ordinarily required annually by the authorities for some of those establishments.

So it was then, that Hepplesmith’s first professional assignment was the completion of a year-end audit for Gino’s Restaurant on Main Street. He was assigned a small office between the eaterie’s kitchen and its pantry and storage room to begin examination of the set of books and statements prepared by one of Gino’s own sons. Thoroughly, as he had been taught at Piddlington, the young CPA went through every voucher, checked out the trail of receipts, reviewed all the supply purchase orders, weight records entered on deliveries, and fresh food supplies from the stock room weighed and transferred to the kitchen by the establishment’s chef; he even sought explanations from staff members for anything he questioned.

Gino’s son the bookkeeper as well as the stock room receiver and maintenance man in his dusty lane-side quarters soon found Hepplesmith with his nit-picking persistence to be tiresome and irritating. The situation came to a head when young Hepplesmith found a discrepancy! His sleuthing discovered that the restaurant’s supply of the huge local potatoes used by the chef for some of his baked dishes were always delivered by a favoured local farmer in one hundred pound sacks as signed for by the receiver. All deliveries were invoiced and paid for by the pound. Yet when the chef’s helper weighed the potatoes when transferred to the kitchen, each sack was lighter by two or three pounds! What happened to the missing potatoes?

Stirling Hepplesmith determined to get to the bottom of it. After all, at the farmer’s price of ten cents a pound the missing potatoes would amount to an extra cost of many dollars in a year’s consumption. The bookkeeper had simply charged the difference in weight to “slippage” but that did not satisfy Hepplesmith. He confronted the stock room receiver who was so aggravated he went to a full sack of potatoes and threw one large spud at the young CPA, crying, “This is what happened to your confounded potatoes!” Hepplewhite dodged the missile, which forthwith smashed against the far wall, but then demanded an explanation. It turned out the man had used up all the lost potatoes to kill a family of rats inhabiting the dark, hidden nooks and recesses at the rear of Gino’s fine eatery.

You must know what happened, of course. Stirling Hepplesmith was nothing if not thorough, complete, and always driven to do the right thing. He immediately made a written report to Hexburg’s reformist health officer. The health officer did his inspection of Gino’s Restaurant and closed the establishment pending proof of a total cleanup and renovation. Gino sued Bishop and Bullard for consequent damages, Bishop and Bullard fired Hepplesmith for incompetence, Hepplesmith sued Bishop and Bullard for wrongful dismissal and all the lawyers in Hexburg were happy for years to come.

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