It’s hard to believe you got the .03 check. Someone had to manually handle that quarter. I can imagine they thought about getting special permission and sitting through a couple meetings to be able to get 5 people to sign a form saying they could write it off, but decided it would be more fun to handle it as if that .03 really mattered. Maybe they are getting a small amount of joy seeing it appear on reports as an outstanding check and watching people discuss it endlessly instead of just deleting it.
When I left college, I paid my bills and left forwarding addresses. The phone company wrote me and said I owed them a similar amount to 22 cents. I did nothing. I got 4 or 5 more notices, then they stopped.