The employee discount worked after they dismissed me

Dear Delyara, I worked at the department store for thirty-two years. This morning, management called me into an office and explained that my role was being eliminated because customers increasingly shop online. They gave me a folder about severance, thanked me for my loyalty, and asked me to return my badge. Before leaving, I went downstairs to buy the winter coat my granddaughter had been admiring. At the register, the young cashier scanned my old employee number, and the discount still worked. Twenty percent. She said, “Lucky you,” because she did not know I had been dismissed forty minutes earlier. I nearly told her, but then she would have looked embarrassed and removed the only kindness the company had accidentally left active. I carried the coat home in a bag bearing the store’s name. My husband said I should have made them pay full price for the way they treated me. He does not understand that I needed the discount. Not financially, although that helped. I needed one final piece of evidence that the system remembered I had belonged there, even after the people upstairs had decided thirty-two years could be placed in a folder and handed back before lunch.