the case of the broken plate

Our office is cleaned weekly on Saturday. On Monday morning, a co-worker came to me and asked if anything in my office appeared to be broken. We looked around, up and down and found nothing. She told me when she was working over the weekend, she heard a crash, followed by a stream of four-letter words. She swore it came from my office, but after a lot of inspecting everything seemed in tact.

Flash forward to the end of the day. Someone was in my office, sitting next to a coffee table I have in the corner. They asked if I had broken my plate. The plate was a square, ceramic plate my sister had painted for me as a gift when I graduated from Samford. It has sat on a stand in my office ever since I started my job.

Upon inspection, I find that the plate was what fell to its demise on Saturday. Never fear, however - cleaning co. to the rescue! They very, very meticulously glued my plate back to where it looked good as new. However, where the plate had chipped (it is painted yellow), they took a yellow highlighter to cover their boo-boo on the front, and even in the tiny cracks on the back. That's right, they used a marker to try to hide the accient from me. Hopefully, the following pictures will explain better.

A note saying "Sorry, my bad." would have worked just fine. Accidents happen. Their little sneaky cover up worked, though - and would have worked longer had someone else not pointed it out!

I have since received a voicemail from our cleaning company. I called them back, but have yet to actually speak to a live person. Could a formal apology be in order? Do they know that I know?