Heavy rain, a ground floor store, and a workshop that lost both its stock and the notebook that said what the stock had been.
What they still had, without knowing it, was eight years of dockets sitting in our system. Every part they had ever bought from us, with the part number, the date and the quantity.
We printed it, sorted it by how often each line had been bought, and handed over a list of the two hundred and six part numbers that made up almost all of their purchases. They rebuilt from that rather than from memory.
It is worth saying what this was not. It was not their stock list, because they bought from other shops too, and we said so plainly rather than letting a useful list look like a complete one.