Last month, we talked about small things that almost took down a company or a person, and here are nine of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The $5,000 thank-you note

I had a friend working as admin staff in a law firm where they lost out on literally millions of dollars in legal fees and a partner was disbarred over an unjustified $5,000 bill to the client.

The firm was representing a client on a high-eight-figure settlement and the legal fees were in the low seven figures, so it was a wildly profitable project for the firm, but greed knows no bounds. After the case wrapped up and the “final bill” went out to the client, she received an additional bill for $5,000 for “post settlement services.” It was really a drop in the bucket for what she had paid so far, but she couldn’t get a clear answer on what the those extra “services” were.

She was so annoyed she complained to the law society over it and the firm finally gave an explanation: all the lawyers on the file, including the partner in charge of her case, billed her 15 minutes of their regular hourly rate to read her thank-you note that she sent after getting the final bill. The law society’s auditor then demanded a detailed list of all their billing rationale and found that at least a quarter of their billings to the client were for dubious at best and totally fraudulent at worst reasons. The firm had to refund that all back, plus pay a huge fine, and the partner was disbarred when it came out that he had been the one directing the firm’s lawyers to bill this way. It also destroyed the credibility of the firm and the other partners went after the disbarred one to recoup the losses.

All over an extra $5,000 bill for reading a thank-you note.

2. The ice supply

A good friend got a job as the business manager for a graduate school department at a major college several years ago. Among her tasks was budgeting and taking care of bills. Shortly after she arrived she noticed that one sub-department had a budget line for $200 a month marked “Ice.” She assumed “Ice” was an acronym (“ICE”) or something college-y and didn’t look into it, as she had bigger fish to fry.

A year later the budget request for “Ice” came in for $240 a month. While a small dollar amount increase, she was asked to look into any increase requests over a certain % increase, so she followed up with the department chair.

Turned out that “Ice” budget was for actual ice. An old professor each week had ice delivered to his office by a local ice manufacturer. So that he could have cocktail parties in his office. With old-school ice cubes. The cost? $50 a week.

When confronted about this, the professor insisted he needed the ice and had been getting it delivered weekly since he got tenure in the 1980s. That’s $2,400 a year, or $50+ grand probably, for something he could get for nothing at the cafeteria or make himself in the office fridge.

Plus, his “cocktail parties” often featured certain attractive under-age undergrads.

The professor decided to retire before the campus ethics board got involved.

3. The eighth grade debate

When I was in the eighth grade, the school’s principal decided he would teach a weekly class of “current events” where the students were asked to bring in newspaper articles and we would discuss them. Since the principal didn’t have a classroom of his own, he used the science teacher’s classroom, which had an office for the science teacher attached.

One day, one of the kids from the class brought in an article about how someone had found “evidence of satanic rituals” in a local park. One of the boys said “Satan, cool!” or something like that, because, well, he was a 13-year-old boy. I’m pretty sure he did it in the voice of Beavis and Butthead. The principal sent him out of the room as punishment.

Our class ERUPTED in accusations of religious intolerance from the principal. We argued and argued, giving him scenario after scenario to determine where his line of religious tolerance was. “Would you admit to this school someone who was of a religion that worshipped the devil?” we asked. “Isn’t it illegal not to?” (We were a private school.) Our interrogations led him to state that he would not admit certain students due to their religion. He kept trying to send us out to recess, but we refused to leave! My class passionately defended the rights of Americans to practice whatever religion they wanted and accused him of practicing discrimination.

As it happens, the science teacher was listening to the entire conversation from his office. Later, I overheard him discussing the incident with another teacher and saying how problematic the conversation was and how he was shocked at the principal’s statements.

About a month later, we received a letter saying that the principal was resigning. I don’t remember exactly what it said, but I do remember my dad saying, “Wow, it sounds like he got canned.”

I’m not 100% sure that the two incidents were related, but also, if they weren’t, it’s quite a coincidence.

4. The misspellings

During my time as a government auditor, the biggest fraud I ever uncovered was a result of inconsistent spelling of a key person’s name in official documents. Think Anderson, Andersen, Andersin. It was annoying me, so I looked for the correct spelling in other documents, which ended up not existing. Which lead to a lot of other things.

5. The budget documents

A long-time CFO at my small nonprofit was brought down by a grumpy board member who couldn’t understand why the CFO could not simply provide the reports she wanted to see directly from our financial system. The CFO had been giving the board heavily edited and formatted budget documents for years and, because she and the rest of the leadership team were so well-respected in our small community, no one ever questioned it. Turns out, we were over budget by about $1 million (on a $7 million budget that had basically doubled over the course of three years) and no one realized it. The grumpy board member kept asking questions and the CFO couldn’t cover her tracks any longer, which led to the firing of the CFO, a major restructure, and two CEO transitions over the next 18 months.

We’re okay again but for a while there, our 100+ year old organization was almost brought down by a lack of checks and balances. The grumpy board member chose to step down after her first term and while no one exactly misses her, we owe her a great deal for not putting up with any prevarication during her time with us.

6. The fancy car

A coworker of mine at a former job worked for our state’s department of revenue. He told me about a time when a colleague of his noticed a Very Fancy sports car in the middle of Absolutely Bloody Nowhere, which was not one of those quiet little town that secretly has a Google data center or something. Colleague, a fellow tax agent, found this odd and when he got back to the office cross-checked the registrations of Very Fancy Sports Cars with the people living in Absolutely Bloody Nowhere. Sure enough, they found him, and after a very little research figured out that he’d been defrauding the company he worked for to the scale of millions.

7. The rejected edits

I had a manger that believed he was best writer in the world. Our company had an editing team that wildly disagreed with that and he greatly resented their “overreach” when they edited his reports to clients. He complained and was eventually told he could have staff familiar with his projects review his reports. So he had me do it, bragging the entire time that I wasn’t going to find anything to change.

I looked at it and pretty quickly found some problems, namely he had taken a report for an entirely different project and done a find and replace for the client’s name. But he hadn’t caught when the clients name was pluralized, which was almost every page. When I told him this he was pissed, argued that he was just being efficient, that no one was going to read it that closely anyway, and I was a terrible writer so what did I know. He refused to fix that problem or make any other edits I suggested, turned it into the client early even because he firmly believed that would make us look good.

The client was the U.S. Air Force.

I wasn’t privy to everything that happened next. But in rapid succession he was let go, we came close to losing all our government contracts, which would have shut down out office, and me and my new boss spent the next six months redoing everything he had previously delivered because we figured out he had been making up data. Data we had on hand! He was so lazy he wasn’t bothering to read my field reports and carefully made maps in favor of writing stuff that he thought sounded right. It was stressful and a mess and cost the company so much money.

If he’d accepted my edits or better yet kept letting the editing team continue to fix his reports, none of that would have happened.

8. The artwork

At a small marketing agency, our biggest client wanted to use a specific piece of artwork in a national ad campaign. Our principals reached out to the artist, who quoted around $50k in licensing fees. The client balked, but still wanted to use that piece of artwork. The principals decided to commission a much smaller artist for a similar piece for $2500, with our agency retaining all the rights.

The client kept nitpicking and asking for revision after revision, until the commissioned piece was extremely similar to that artwork they really wanted. The new artist expressed multiple concerns about copying, but the principals kept pushing to get to where the client wanted the artwork to be. The ad campaign was published, and the client put out plenty of press releases and social content showcasing the art.

Allllllllll of this communication was done over email, which made the original artists’ lawyers’ jobs extremely easy when they sued our agency and the client for a couple million in copyright infringement a month later. The case eventually settled in the original artist’s favor, and both our agency and our client had to pay out the original licensing cost, plus legal fees, and take down all content featuring the copied artwork. I was one of the few agency employees unlucky enough to survive the layoffs afterward, and the cost-saving measures the owners took in the years after got pretty interesting.

9. The treasurer

15+ years ago, I joined the (volunteer, unpaid) board for a youth performing arts nonprofit. At my first board meeting, I found out that our treasurer was under investigation for stealing up hundreds of thousands of dollars from our organization, his employer, and the booster group at the school where he taught jazz band. (Y’all, this isn’t even the thing that almost brought the org down!) The result was that we were without a treasurer and couldn’t find anyone to do the job on a volunteer basis.

Instead of paying to hire an hourly accountant, the board decided the president (who was a freelance writer for financial publications so of course he’s qualified) would serve as both the president and the treasurer. Safeguards were put in place so that any purchases or withdraws over $500 would require two signatures. This went on for six years without much turmoil. Books were balanced every year, and the president/treasurer was so fiscally conservative we had to fight tooth and nail to buy equipment that should’ve been replaced several years prior, so things seemed fine money-wise.

In year six, we had an actual CPA elected to the board as an at-large member, and in her second year she ran for treasurer. The president-treasurer seemed genuinely elated he no longer had to do both roles after seven years, but that whole next year, he threw up blocker after blocker for her. Things like QuickBooks “couldn’t transfer access” to her or they could never agree on a time to meet at the bank to get her added to our bank accounts. He also insisted that he’d file our taxes so she wouldn’t have to deal with that hassle. For some reason, these things weren’t red flags for the rest of us, partly because he was still around and partly because he was a “nice” guy.

At this point, I’d transitioned out of a board role and into a paid staff role. When the new treasurer started creating paychecks and mileage reimbursements, I told her that my mileage checks were wrong and much higher than normal. The old treasurer been using the IRS standard rate for charities ($0.14 in 2026) instead of the IRS rate for business ($0.72 in 2026) which is what the new treasurer was using. He doubled down on the charity rate being the correct one even though the staff were all paid contractors. The new person was, of course, correct, and this mileage fiasco made her look into more and more of the documents from previous years.

And that’s when we found out he hadn’t filed our taxes in the past seven years, which included the form for our 501(c)3 status. The same status that allowed us to be tax exempt on every purchase we’d made for the past seven years.

The president-treasurer was immediately removed from the board, and the new treasurer and VP started down the nearly two-year road of retaining legal counsel, rectifying our taxes, re-applying for our tax-exempt status, calculating the back taxes we’d owed not just ot the IRS but all the sales tax for seven years, and doing damage control with the member groups we served. As a staff member, I know there were discussions and details I wasn’t privy to, but I do know legal action against him was talked about and then dismissed as an idea.

I’m happy to say that I’ve been involved with the org for almost 20 years now, and we are thriving. We’ve more than doubled in size in that time and finally have a paid executive director, about 30 paid staff members (so the board can actually be a guiding, “volunteer” board), and most importantly — a paid accountant.

The post the ice supply, the thank-you note, and other small things that almost took down a company appeared first on Ask a Manager.

In broad strokes, the electoral context for the Senate race in Texas is clear enough. Democrats are going to be a major underdog in a state Trump carried by 14 points in 2024. It’s also clear that Democrats can win — if Republicans can win a Senate race in Massachusetts and Democrats win one in Alabama in the right circumstances, between what’s likely to be the very favorable political context for Dems in November and at least the partial reversal of some of the demographic trends that made Texas non-competitive in 2024 the Dems aren’t drawing dead.

To get into more detail, and on why Paxton winning might give the Dems at least a puncher’s chance:

The most basic take here is that Trump seems to have questionable taste in candidates. Just like with Herschel Walker in 2022, he chose the loyal but scandal-plagued over the safe “establishment” option.

In previous cycles, these Trump-backed candidates have seriously underperformed. And Trump’s endorsement of Paxton comes at a time when Trump’s political standing is probably at its all-time low: he’s at a net -19.3 in our approval rating tracker, the worst rating for any president at this point in a nonconsecutive term.2

To level-set here: the Texas general election contest is the proverbial case of a rock meeting a hard place. It’s a very red state, having repeatedly defied Democrats’ wishes to “Turn Texas Blue”. It’s the kind of place that has survived blue waves, like in 2018, when Ted Cruz was just far enough ashore to beat Beto O’Rourke by 2.7 points.

Ordinarily, this year’s race would project as a carbon copy of the 2018 contest. While Democrats have expanded their lead to nearly 7 points on our generic ballot tracker, our modeled version of state partisanship scores projects that would still translate to roughly an R +4 in Texas, producing another case of Democratic dreams narrowly deferred.

But that’s assuming “generic” candidates, which Paxton very much is not.

Polls testing both Republicans against Talarico have suggested a serious opening for Democrats. Cornyn and Paxton have fared similarly against Talarico in recent polls of the November contest — and similarly mediocrely. You could even argue for the presence of a slight Talarico edge since he won his primary (without a runoff) in March.

This is the point at which we must step in to express some skepticism. This early in the race, a well-designed model would place greater weight on “fundamentals” like state partisanship than on polls. Candidate quality does matter, but large over- and underperformances are getting rarer.

But scandals do still matter electorally, and our historical research suggests the impact is roughly in the 5-point range. In other words, if Texas were projected to be an R +4 in November given “generic” candidates, that might flip to a tie or a D +1 against a scandal-plagued Republican. And scandals are a category in which Paxton might be the Southeast Division regional record-holder (quite an accomplishment in a subdivision that also includes Louisiana).

In other words, while we’d be skeptical of polls showing that Cornyn would lose to Talarico, prediction markets showing a toss-up between Talarico and Paxton are probably working off reasonable assumptions.

It’s an uphill climb. But the Democrats can’t re-take the Senate and stop the Trumpification of the federal judiciary without a couple upsets, and they need to contest any remotely winnable seat. Talarico needs to be given all the resources he needs as long as the race is at all competitive, and let’s hope he proves to be a good candidate.

The post [Midterm] Blexas? appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the state’s Republican primary runoff election yesterday, giving a big ego boost to Donald Trump, who endorsed Paxton only after polling already showed he was likely to win. It it wasn’t even remotely close: With 99 percent of the votes tallied, Paxton stomped Cornyn by nearly 28 points, with 63.8 percent of the vote to Cornyn’s 36.2 percent. Texas Republicans had no problems choosing the scandal-rotted Paxton over the blandly rightwing Cornyn, convincing themselves that Cornyn was some kind of RINO despite his nearly perfect voting record on legislation Trump supported. Given a choice between Rightwing and Fucking Insane Rightwing, Texas Republicans will almost always go with crazy. At least in the primaries.

What remains to be seen is whether Trump’s hardcore MAGA support will turn out in large enough numbers to elect Paxton in November, especially if the economy keeps getting worse and Trump’s stupid Iran War keeps fuel prices high. Maaaaybe high oil prices will lead to more oil and gas drilling in Texas, and more jobs, but it’s hard to say whether Texas voters will consider that a good tradeoff if gasoline continues to cost nearly $4 a gallon in the state as it is right now.

The other big question in the race against Democratic nominee James Talarico will be whether Texas voters at large are willing to overlook what a sleazy bastard Paxton is. Sure, MAGA primary voters didn’t mind that Paxton had a Forever Indictment on securities fraud charges (settled in 2024), was impeached by his own party (but narrowly avoided conviction), AND has allegedly cheated on his wife (she’s divorcing him on “biblical grounds,” and we don’t think that meant he wore mixed fabrics). Paxton’s constant culture warring on favorite MAGA themes like immigration and hating LGBTQ+ people may no longer play as well with voters outside the diehard MAGA base, either.

When the outcome of the primary runoff was clear, Talarico quickly released an ad calling Paxton “the most corrupt politician in America,” which probably made Trump jealous since nobody is more superlatively corrupt.

After pointing out that Paxton was impeached by his own party just three years ago, Talarico added, “That kind of corruption is the rot at the core of this broken system. It's why we can't afford anything. It's why we can't get ahead no matter how hard we work.” It’s a good ad!

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Feed The Kitty

One of the funny things about Cornyn’s loss — maybe not ha-ha-funny — was that in TrumpMerica, a lot of the things that used to count as electoral strengths are now liabilities. Cornyn was an unfailingly loyal Republican, moving up into leadership and serving as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and as Senate GOP whip, but to MAGA, those team-player lines on his résumé didn’t make him a respected leader, they made him a “Washington insider,” a member of the “corrupt establishment,” and again, a RINO. His free trade positions may once have meant he was a principled free-market conservative, but now they make him a scary “globalist.”

Sure, Cornyn reliably voted with Trump — 99 percent of the time! — and unlike Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, Cornyn voted against impeaching Dear Leader after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. But he rejected the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, voted to certify that election, and continued to criticize Trump for having incited the attack on the US Capitol. Why, he didn’t even pretend the rioters were mere tourists!

Also, following the 2022 Uvalde massacre, Cornyn helped write the very very mild package of incremental improvements to US gun laws in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which Texas Republicans seized on to proclaim that Cornyn wanted to take everyone’s guns away. Trump obligingly called Cornyn a RINO who supported “Radical Left Democrats” who wanted “to TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY.”

No wonder Texas Republicans voted against that commie John Cornyn. He didn’t even manage to win Trump’s endorsement earlier this month when he introduced a bill to upgrade a major Texas-to-almost-Canada highway into a full freeway, to be named Interstate 47, get it? Sadly for Cornyn, the gesture didn’t catch Dear Leader’s eye. Maybe it was too nuanced — he could’ve added a gold medal and a peace prize to the proposed highway signs.

The Texas Gooper primary was the most expensive the state has ever seen, with dark-money Republican-aligned groups pouring millions into the race. The super-PAC supporting Cornyn, Texans for a Conservative Majority, raised almost $35.6 million this election cycle, with nearly a a quarter of that total, about $8.3 million, coming from just six big dark-money nonprofits. All told, Texas’s US Senate race has already seen spending of $112 million, blasting the 2022 US Senate election in Arizona out of the water for the most expensive Senate race ever. And the general election campaign is just getting started. With control of the Senate in play, spending on both sides is likely to be astronomical. Could be “interesting” to see whether the big money that went to support Cornyn will now start flowing to the far crazier Paxton.

It’s also going to get extremely ugly, with Paxton and his patron Trump lying incessantly about Talarico and depicting him as a crazy radical loon who hates Jesus, which they’ve already been doing for months. Trump himself has joined in with a bunch of weird lies, calling Talarico “Alfred E. Neumann,” insisting that Talarico loves open borders and crime, and a bunch of other bizarre accusations. According to Trump, Talarico also “believes there are 6 genders, is insulting to Jesus Christ, will never support the Military, was a big Mask Wearer until recently, and is a Vegan who dislikes meat.” (Reality: Talarico in in his 2022 campaign for the state House suggested eating less meat because it’s healthier and better for the climate. Talk about a radical madman.)

And yes, Republicans are really doubling down on the claim that Talarico is a “vegan,” because that means he’s probably a gay homosexual. Talarico doesn’t seem especially worried. Back in March, his campaign released an official rebuttal consisting of a photo showing him chowing down on a barbecued turkey leg at the Texas state fair.

And in an interview yesterday, Talarico used the accusation as a springboard to remind voters of a slightly more important distinction between himself and Paxton, saying, “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.” Nicely done.

Nevertheless, it’s going to be a long hot summer of stupid tofu jokes, and worse. You could send James Talarico a donation for just the price of a few pounds of Trump-tariffed beef.

OPEN THREAD.

[NPR / Texas Monthly / NBC News / Open Secrets / Joe. My God.]

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Where's The Beef?

I wake before dawn to coordinate with my vast network of parental co-conspirators. Our agenda this morning is straight fire, as the youth would say, beginning with a vigorous debate about scheduling sunrise for maximum cruelty. We ultimately settle on triggering dawn just a liiiiiitle bit earlier than it was yesterday.

We think it’ll be funny to do this incrementally over time, and then start inching it back again, just to make sure our kids can scream “But the sun’s not even up yet!” at a slightly different time each day.

After receiving an updated list of slang we can use to mortify our children, we adjourn. In my rush to rouse my child from her blissful slumber, I trip, deliberately upending her curated mountain of Floor Clothes. The exact pair of micro-shorts she planned to wear is now lost forever. I have no one but myself to blame for blowing past our intended departure time.

I set this time arbitrarily, just to be mean. The resulting argument is absolutely my fault.

After dropping off my exhausted, mistreated child at what is basically jail, I drive to work, where I callously disregard a cascade of urgent texts.

Mom

MOM

MOMMY

Where r presents in my lunch

Pretzels not prezzies

Can u bring

Mom

I forgot to finish my project

Did u buy

Glitter

Can u bring and

MOMMY

When I finally wrap up whatever meeting, brain surgery, or congressional testimony is preventing me from attending to my child’s needs, I respond only “We will discuss this tonight. Stop texting before you get suspended.”

I do this because texting complete sentences takes forever, and also because I don’t care that my child is starving and facing a flunk-inducing glitter penalty.

On my way home from work, I don’t pick up food my child actually likes. Why would I? We have gross food at home, and I enjoy preparing it for maximum disgust.

I cruelly ignore her gags of despair over both food and math, because I’m too busy tapping away on some stupid work thing.

When I finish drafting my presentation for the CEO, sequencing DNA for a cure to cancer, or writing some speech for the United Nations, I close my laptop and announce that it’s time to relax.

My child’s friends are all watching the ending of Trashy People Treating Each Other Atrociously, but I make sure she misses it. It’s time to watch Documentary About Fonts or, if I’m feeling adventurous, People in Old Clothes Talking Fancy.

I enjoy making my child a social pariah. The world is full of children who never get to learn this much about kerning.

I’m so busy watching my show that I forget to remind my child about her overdue project. The fact that I don’t know to remind her is beside the point. My child is resourceful, and she will totally be able to finish as long as I know, without being told, to take her to Target before it closes at ten.

I set this time arbitrarily and just to be mean. The resulting argument is absolutely my fault.

After another hard day of ruining my child’s life, it’s time for bed. I begin my evening routine of slathering myself with cheap drug-store lotion and maybe Vaseline, who knows? It’s like I don’t even know about retinol or Sephora. I think Drunk Elephant is an intoxicated pachyderm.

That’s why I look exactly as ancient as I am. I may say that forty-whatever isn’t old, but pores don’t lie.

I am asleep by 10:30 p.m. Then by 11:15, after my child wakes me up because she heard a noise. Then by 12:02, after she wakes me up again to remind me about the glitter.

Then, at 5:15 a.m., when my alarm wakes me up so I can get to CVS when it opens at six (or is it seven?), so I can assess their craft supplies.

I hurry back to make the daily Parent Conspiracy Roundtable, of course. I never miss it. Today’s agenda looks like it’s going to eat and leave no crumbs.