Did I tell you?

[andyofne]

Andy's Blog

Did I tell you about how someone stole $400 out of my desk at work last week?

I'll try to keep a long story short. But you know how that goes with me.

For the last five years I've been managing our soda machine. I order product, fill the machine, remove the money, covert the coins to dollars, count the money and prepare deposits that a 'bank guy' picks up periodically.

Some times I'll end up with $1000 to deposit but I usually try to do it before I get to $500. Most of the money sits in the machine which is in our break room and would be difficult to steal (since it's a big bag of coins).

Anyway... my boss started putting 'other cash' into the bag a couple years ago. Then, last year, someone decided I needed to keep the postage machine cash in my desk, too. (Postage machine cash is money generated by employees using the postage machine & putting their coins/cash in a cup which is later dumped into a bank bag in my desk).

So, on Tuesday, I unlocked my desk and broke a $5 for five ones for one of my co-workers. This is a very common thing and I never think anything of it; however, I did notice that I had accumulated quite a stack of ones along with a bunch of twenties. I estimated there was between $300 and $400 dollars in the cash bag. The other bag I keep has the postage money which consists of a lot of loose change and maybe $20 in cash.

I had an appointment out of the building and left the office for an hour. I came back, worked the rest of the afternoon and then locked my desk at 5pm when I left the building.

When I came in the next day, I unlocked my desk around 10 and discovered that the cash bag was unzipped and rather skinny. When I looked inside it was completely empty.

This was a disturbing discovery.

The other bag appeared untouched.

I went down to the billing office and asked if anyone had, for any reason, taken the cash out of my desk. I didn't expect that they would have since no one had ever touched it before. So I wasn't surprised by their answer.

Now, my boss had been out of town in Mexico for the last few days and I didn't know what to do. I decided to report the incident to the senior partner in the corporation. He decided to do nothing and wait for my boss to return to work the next day.

Needless to say I was both pissed off AND a little nervous about the whole incident. But more than that, I was embarrassed.

I decided right then that I was going to set up a surveillance camera and record everything that occured in my office when I was not there.

I bought a $50 web cam at radio shack (across the street) and set it all up using WebcamXP software which has a cool motion detection feature that not only records stills but will start recording video when the camera detects movement.

The program sends me an e-mail every few seconds when motion is detected so I do get 'spammed' with stills on my blackberry but I can get an idea of who is in there and what they are doing.

Right now, I can't view the video until I get back to the office (my attempts to vpn in and watch it remotely didn't work to my satisfaction and eventually crashed the webcam software).

Last night I snagged some footage of one of the cleaning people sitting at my desk for about 8 minutes. Sort of looking around, examining things around my office all while changing my trash bag. It really looked mighty suspicious although she made no attempt to open any drawers or anything. Along those lines, though, I DID talk to the supervisor of the cleaning crew and let him know about the missing cash.

I also noticed that they never seem to clean anything. Nothing gets wiped down and no vacuuming is done.

I'm considering putting a couple more of these cameras in more public areas of the office to see if they actually do clean any damn thing but for now I'm concerned about catching whomever has been stealing from my own office.

In the last year I've lost a:

- bag of cash
- laptop (with broken LCD -- I hope they enjoyed that!)
- digital camera (they didnt get the battery charger)
- digital projector -- the biggest lost at $1500

And that's just stuff I notice.

I have drawers and cabinets filled with shit that I don't use regularly and when I go looking for shit I can never find it.

I know I need a better inventory / storage system, thanks.

So, I'll try to remember to follow-up with any pertinent information in the future. Meanwhile, you can periodically catch my office cam at http://li.centio.us/webcamXP.html