Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour by Yelena Lembersky

Author:Yelena Lembersky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644696712
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Published: 2022-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

At noon, a man and young woman arrived at the hair salon and asked for me. The man said, “I am the outgoing director. Welcome! We need to sign an official form transferring the two salons from me to you.”

The younger woman was an accountant at Kosmétika’s headquarters. She was there to oversee the transfer. She said, “We will need to cosign the materiálnaya otvétstvennost (personal liability) certificate. You are taking legal guardianship and personal liability for the salons’ tangible and financial assets, which are the property of the state.”

I thought, Oh, the wretched bureaucracy. The words materiálnaya otvétstvennost meant nothing to me. White noise.

The outgoing director took me across the street to the beauty salon. He showed me the treatment chairs. “Let’s count them and write down the number.”

He said he received them recently as a set, bundled with some defective tools and equipment. The chairs were glossy, upholstered with maroon leather, foreign-made, and of good quality. Then he showed me a closet with old rugs, mops, and broken hair dryers. There were also several small, dusty boxes. “All of this was written off.”

I wondered, What is “written off”? More white noise. Fine, I’ll find it out later. I opened one of the small, dusty boxes. It had scissors, nail clippers, tweezers—a manicure kit you could buy at a household store for a few rubles. The former director said again, “These sets came bundled with the treatment chairs. They are defective. We couldn’t use them, so we wrote them off. You can throw them out or do whatever you want with them. Now, please sign this certificate of transfer of state property from me to you. And sign this form too, under the list of assets you’ve received.”

I signed it. The accountant took one copy. I took the other and filed it away in my desk. The boring part was done. The former director and accountant wished me good luck and were gone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.