And something had gone wrong.

Something had spooked them, sent them hurrying out through the restaurant in the middle of their careful operation, and in their rush to leave they had done the one clumsy human thing in the whole professional affair: they had dropped the master file, the entire case, down behind the booth, and left it there, and left me holding their four-hundred-dollar bill, never dreaming that the very file they had lost would be handed to me the next morning by my own trembling manager.

There is an irony in it so complete that I still marvel at it.

The single worst moment of that whole night, the moment that felt like pure cruelty, my manager forcing me to empty my tip envelope over a walkout, was in fact the direct result of the single best thing that had ever happened to me arriving clumsily and going briefly wrong.