Urge to kill rising....

I hope this isn't a sign of how the rest of the year's going to be...

My old employer in the US sent me through a cheque for the amount owing to me at the end of my contract, It was a relatively small amount of about US$400.
I subsequently went and lost the cheque whilst on the way to deposit it at my bank.
So i emailed the HR contact at my old work and in an effort to not look the fool, told them to cancel the cheque immediately as it had been damaged and was no longer legible.

This would prove to be a bad move.

After a number of emails, the HR guy in the US told me they didn't keep track of cheque payments and he'd have to go through all the cheque stubs manually to search out my cheque.
Way to run a large business, douchebags.

Some time passes and I'm getting eager to get my money, so I email Mr HR Guy again who tells me they found the cheque, and it's been cashed and has my signature on it.

Hmmm...

So some dirty fucker has found my cheque, signed some bullshit and cashed in.

Now I'm left in this horrible predicament where I have all this anger, but I'm unsure as to where I should be directing it.

At the Cheque Finder? Well obviously, but not really. I'm not so angry at this person. To justify things in my head, I imagine the finder to be a poor homeless guy, who stumbles across a cheque, takes it to a dodgy bureau de change and cashes enough money to house and feed himself and Christopher; his one-armed, polio-ridden son. More likely it was one of the strung out crack fiends that live down the road, but I push that thought to the back of my mind.

Should I be angry with the person behind the counter at the bureau de change? Well yes. This is where my anger would most comfortably reside. Directed toward the incompetent fuck behind the counter who manages to cash a cheque that is in someone elses name and in a foreign currency. I'm sure you need ID or something to cash a cheque. Don't you have to put your driver's license number on the cheque as well? Or something? Anything? Arghhhhhh!!!

Unfortunately the only point I can come back to is that if I had initially told Mr HR Guy that I had lost the cheque, rather than told him it was 'damaged', I wouldn't be in this predicament. He could have cancelled the cheque immediately and there would be no problem. My tendency to post rationalise things in order to protect my ego tells me that the company is so incompetent they wouldn't have been able find the cheque to cancel it anyways, but I know this isn't the case.
Which only leaves me to blame myself.
And only being able to be angry at myself makes me angry too.
So now there's this snowball of anger rolling around inside me. An angerball if you will. Growing larger and angrier by the second..
I'm going to bed.
Fuck you 2008. You'd wanna be better when I wake up.