“A place for everything and everything in its place.”That principle sounds so simple, but the reality of verifying inventory is that receipts get recorded wrong, conversion from cases to eaches gets scrambled, paperwork gets lost, merchandise is “temporarily” stashed in the wrong place, etc. In fact, there are a thousand and one ways for inventory to go awry. Although, on the spur of the moment, I can account for only 998 of them.I come by my disdain for taking inventory honestly. When my late father was manager of the local (Lewisburg, Tennessee) farmers cooperative, he would stagger home late, cross-eyed and muttering about hoping he never had to count another Ortho product. (That’s what he got for being a math whiz.