I lost a receipt. It came with the Lands End order I got at the office on Friday. I saw it flutter out of the bag and onto the floor, but I have no idea where it went from there. Well, I have some idea, but only in the negative. I know where it did not go. At home that night, after trying everything on and realizing the receipt was not there, I checked the package, I checked the four (!) catalogs that came with my items, I checked my laptop case and tote and purse. No receipt. Since it was Friday and I wasn’t planning to go in to work on the weekend, I wrote myself a note in my planner to look for it at the office on Monday. It was probably in the file folder I put my desktop papers in at the end of the day. Yesterday, which was Monday, I left my planner at home, so did not see the note. Nor did I happen upon the receipt, either. So where is it? In the catalog I took out of my bag to give to a woman I work with? Thrown out by the cleaning people over the weekend? I do not know.

Why do I care? After all, I can verify the amount on my credit card bill when it comes against the e-mail confirmation, so I don’t need the receipt for that. And everything fit, so I don’t need to hassle with a return without receipt scenario. The biggest reason it bothers me is I feel it’s a sign I’m not as organized and in control as I like to think I am. Such a simple thing—pick the receipt up off the floor and put it in a safe place where I’d see it later—and I didn’t manage to do it. That this incompetence was reinforced by my forgetting my planner at home the very next workday does not help one bit. Then there’s the worry about who’s got the receipt and what information they can glean from it. I don’t think Lands End puts the whole credit card number on there, so unauthorized charges aren’t a big concern, and my name and address are not a secret, so if anyone wanted to find me, they could do it without that piece of paper. What I am worried about is someone knowing what size I wear, which is really stupid. After all, if they see me, which the people I work with do, they know how big I am. Yet that deep down belief that I’m shamefully large lives on in the how unsettled I am at the thought that someone might see I’ve ordered size 16 pants. The stupid things I let bother me.