Hell of a week (so far)

     First off I guess I should say thanks.  I was busy looking at my Google analytics before I began this blog entry and as it turns out since I got back into writing 8 of my 10 most popular entries ever have occurred since I returned to the page.  I am under no illusion that my writing has somehow become vastly improved compared to some of my older scribblings so perhaps the adage absence make the heart grow fonder is indeed true, or maybe it is just a curiosity killed the cat thing, in any event I wanted to start this entry off by saying thanks anyway, it is greatly appreciated.



    Okay, onto bigger and better things.  Alright maybe not better, because this week has not been a pleasant one by any stretch of the imagination.  It certainly started off well enough, but then work got in the way.  It used to be when I worked in talk radio most every day started off with with a certain level of excitement, since there was no real idea in what direction any given show would take.  Admittedly there were days that you could sense a bad, or at least depressing, show was in the offing, some depressing or horrible story was dominating the headlines and try as you might want to avoid it, the show would almost have to be steered in that direction, simply because the audience would want to talk about it.  On those days, as sad or depressing as a potential show may have been, at least going in you could brace yourself for it to a degree.  But there were other days, where shows began with such promise but by the end of the show I would leave the studio and feel almost like I would need to take a bath, just to wash off the muck and mire that it seemed like I was wading through for the previous three hours.

     That is kind of how my week has been.  Honestly it had started off great.  I was off on Sunday and it was my first day off in three weeks, that in and of itself was a bit of a blessing.  But the day got better and in part it was due to my radio career.  One of my tasks in radio was to spend time tracking down guests for the show, it could be anyone from an author to simply a name that appeared in a newspaper article.  Well, as I was sitting around my apartment Sunday afternoon I decided that I would use my powers for good, or at least, the good of me.  So I spent some time tracking down old friends, two of them to be precise.  One, Hope, I blogged about a little recently (and in the past for those who are being all inquisitive) and the other, Debbie, was a friend of mine since I was a teenager.  Debbie originally dated a friend of mine, but even as their relationship, like so many teenage romances, came to an end, our friendship continued to grow.  The last I had heard she was getting married and moving to Virginia, and as a result we fell out of touch probably around 15 or so years ago.  Well, as luck would have it I would find both of them on Sunday and even get a chance to catch up with both of them a bit.  It was good to find out that they are both happy now and at very good places in their lives.  I will not go into to many details, simply because they do have a right to privacy which I have no intention of violating.  Needless to say, by Sunday night I was almost euphoric with everything that had happened.

     Monday began the downward spiral however.  I went to work and after getting everything from Gus Millers, I got into Smithfield News around 9am or so.  About 9:30 the phone on my desk rings.  The thing about the phone on my desk is that I don't even know the number, so I am always at a loss as to how people actually can call me there.  My best guess is that when they call the store number, if they opt for the manager option then my desk phone rings.  Which is funny, because that option used to go to a voice mail of some sort, but now it is my number I guess, I really don't know how it works.  Anyway, the phone rings at my desk so naturally I answer it.  There is a lady on the other end of the phone,  and while she seemed polite enough, there was also not an edge to her voice, but a certain firmness, if not anger.  She proceeds to tell me that her husband was in the store on Sunday and he bought a pack of cigarettes.  After purchasing the cigarettes he left, forgetting his wallet on the counter.  When he came back in about 15 minutes later he asked about his wallet and it was given back to him, but the money that was in the wallet was gone.  She then came to the store to ask what happened to the contents of the wallet, first speaking with Chavez, who was in charge that day and with Brittany, who was also on duty working the cash register.  She said Chavez told her that she could call back in the morning when a manager would be there who could help her, whereas Brittany took her outside to talk to her, in her opinion Brittany was nervous when they talked, and she was told that while she could call the store chances are that nobody would actually look to see what happened to her husband's wallet.

     Hearing that just pissed me off honestly.  Admittedly I had no idea what did or did not happen, but to tell a customer that we wouldn't even bother to try looking into it was completely over the line in my book.  In fact it made me want to look into it.  But I did have things to do, I had all of the sales numbers to balance from Gus Millers, plus we have four different deliveries coming in on Monday morning, so while I wanted to look into things, it wasn't something that I could just drop everything and rush right into.  So I finished the phone call, and just said to Dee that later on I needed to learn the password to get into the camera system to look at the footage from Sunday.  We have on site a 16 camera system in the store that is supposed to hold up to 30 days worth of footage, going back a day should be nothing.  

     I get most of my work done and then I tell Ed and Dee the specifics about the phone call and what I was looking for.  My hope was that I would get back to the time in question, see if the gentleman had indeed left his wallet behind and if he did, then see what happened to it.  Did someone pick it up?  Was it dumped somewhere else in the store after it was emptied and one of our people found it and brought it to the front of the store, not realizing what had happened?  I had no idea, but I sure as the hell wanted to find out.  I roll back the footage and get to the point where the man in question was in the store.  I was told he and his son were downtown skateboarding and sure enough, there were two people in the frame, both with skateboards and he does come up to the counter and buy a pack of cigarettes.  And in fact, he does leave his wallet on the counter after the transaction and proceeds to leave the store.  I see the man's wallet plain as day still laying on the counter.  So now all I have to do is see what happens next.  Except I can't.  The frame freezes.  The camera starts jumping forward in 12-15 second intervals and the picture doesn't change.  I try speeding up, slowing down, none of it matters.  When the camera starts showing movement again, there are new customers at the counter, the wallet is already gone.  So my questions are not answered by this.

     We put in a call to the guy who installed our camera system,  hoping he can come in and take a look at it, perhaps show us a way to fix the footage that seems to be skipping on the recording, but he is unavailable on Monday, meanwhile we got about four more calls that day from the lady who first called and I am unable to give her any updates on the situation because I know little more than I did when this process first started.  I end up taking her last call, I tell her that we have located the time frame on the camera but we need our tech guy to come in and help us recover the footage before I can proceed.

     Ed and Dee decide they are going home for the day, I say that I want to stick around for a bit and watch some more of the camera, perhaps I can get lucky and and get it to run normally if I play with it a bit.  I have no luck with the time frame in question, but by sitting there and watching the footage going forward I do notice something.  I see the man come back in the store, he approaches the counter and is apparently talking to Chavez, Chavez starts checking the drawers behind the counter meanwhile the man is looking through his backpack to see if maybe he put his wallet in there.  Of course I could tell by seeing it earlier on the counter, the man will not find his wallet in his bag, but I watch Chavez check all of the drawers underneath the registers, which is where most anything that is found in the store ends up, he checks all of them but fails to find anything.  The man again leaves the store but a minute or so later Brittany comes in (she might have been having a cigarette outside, I don't know, and the guy is following her.  Brittany goes right to the last drawer, pulls a wallet out and gives it to the man.  His wallet was behind the counter after all.  It left me more suspicious, but again I never did see what happened to the wallet from the time it was left on the counter until the time it was pulled out of the drawer, I only know that Chavez looked in that same drawer a minute earlier and saw nothing.  I stopped the camera at that point, packed my stuff up and left work, having a very uneasy feeling in my stomach.

     Tuesday morning things start pretty much like every morning, I stop by Gus Millers grab what I need and go to Smithfield.  I get to Smithfield, Dee is already there, she is usually in before me now because I have to stop at our other store first.  I may start earlier than her, but she gets to Smithfield before I do.  Anyway, I say that I have something to show you, but I want to wait until Ed comes in and you both see it.  Ed comes in around 10am, at which point I show them what I saw before I left, first the man coming back into the store and Chavez looking in all of the drawers for the wallet, then a minute later Brittany coming in the store with he same man and going right to the drawer with the wallet in it, one of the drawers that Chavez had looked in a minute earlier.  I didn't make any conclusions, I only stated that what we were looking at did not look good.

     Chavez was working that day so Ed called him down to the office and asked him what happened, I wasn't in the office so I don't know the specifics of that conversation.  I had my own grocery order to do that day, as well as three different cigarette orders so I had my hands full with other stuff.   Al I do know is whatever Chavez and Ed talked about, Ed seemed okay with it.  Later on, after I had finished my order and the same lady had called the store a couple more times asking if there was any new news as to what was happening (I didn't speak to her so I didn't know) I am back in the office and she calls a third time on the store line.  One of the cashiers brought the phone down to me and I asked Ed what he wanted me to say.  He decided to just take the call himself, and that was probably when he got the same vibe I had gotten when I first spoke to her, that whoever was on the phone was upset, but being honest with him because after her phone call Ed decides to call Brittany.  Now Ed has an issue with his hear, so he usually has his cell phone on either speaker or set very loud, so everyone in the office heard Brittany confess to taking the money out of the wallet, then she apologized for what she did.  It wasn't a very long conversation but it answered some of the questions.   Ed said that he wanted to to meet with Brittany on Wednesday to talk about what happened.  She calls back in about 10 minutes and says she can meet with Ed today if he wants, but Ed had things to do outside of work, so e said just to wait until Wednesday and ended the phone call.  After the call Ed talked to Dee and I, asking us what we thought, but before we gave him an answer we were to go home and think about it overnight.  I already knew my answer, giving me twelve hours to determine what I thought was obvious only gave me twelve hours to make a more airtight argument.

     Wednesday comes and I go into work a little earlier, it is payday and I don't know when Ed will want to talk to Dee and myself, but I know that people will be in and out of the office all morning getting their paychecks so I thought the chance of getting a meeting in would probably be sooner rather than later.  But it wasn't, Ed arrived at his normal time and soon enough people began filtering into the office in order to receive their paychecks, so the meeting isn't going to happen first thing.  But soon enough Brittany comes in to receive her paycheck, a which point Ed asks me to close the door and has Dee and I both join him around his desk while he talks to Brittany.  He says how disappointed he is, and she tries explaining herself again, but then says something that I found particularly offputting when she said that she had already explained herself once and apologized and wasn't going to sit there to be interrogated.   But I kept m mouth shut, at least until Ed finished and he asked Dee and myself what we should do, and I was probably the most forceful one in the room when I stated what to me was obvious, that Brittany had to be fired because we can't have customers coming in the door wondering if our staff is going to rip them off.  The meeting ended shortly thereafter, Ed still hadn't decided what he was going to do, he wanted another day to think about it.

     To a certain degree I understand Ed's predicament.  Over the year or so that Brittany worked for us, I can say she would be on the short list of people with whom I have never butted heads.  Not that I go looking for that mind you, but over the course of being at a place for 4 1/2 years disagreements will pop up.  If you would have asked me two weeks ago if I thought any of our employees were capable of such an act, she would not have been on my radar in that regard.  And Ed can get distracted by his relationships with certain employees, at times I would argue it clouds his judgment.  I probably have benefited from that, I probably have more leeway than some people that work there do, and I know that and try not to take advantage of it.  I have seen perks be thrown my way, concert tickets, baseball tickets, hockey tickets, gifts, money that other people haven't gotten and I would like to think those are because of the job I do for him and the company, still at times it is a little much even by my standards.  Brittany is one of those people that I am sure Ed thought he could trust and was trying to twist logic and reason in such a manner that it would all make sense.  I just spent two years trying to do that in a relationship, I know how hard it is to want to believe something is true only to have the real truth smack you in the face.  It's disappointing and it hurts, yet the only way to  move on is to accept it for what it is, a betrayal and nothing more.  You enter the realm of fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

     So Wednesday ended, still no decision from Ed.  But today there was and today Ed basically decided that he would not be fooled again.  I don't think he took any great pleasure in it, I don't think anyone who was involved in the decision did, but Ed decided that he had no choice but to fire Brittany.

     It was a somber week, at least so far yet I am still hoping that tomorrow will be better.  Perhaps how the day ended will be a sign of better things to come.  After I left Smithfield I again made my sojourn to Gus Millers to reload the lottery machine and also to help out the technician from Verizon who was working on our phone lines there, because our ATM and money order machine kept shutting off. As it turns out, we have 7 phone lines for that store and nobody could figure out what phone number went where, save for the store phone itself so it is a jigsaw puzzle unto itself trying to diagnose where the problem is let alone fix the problem, and phone techs get paid $120 for every 30 minutes on site, so this is going to be a costly proposition even if we know exactly where to look.   But as I was at the store I looked out the window and it was snowing, which was odd because it was at least partly sunny outside and not even all that cold, probably lower 40s, certainly not cold enough for anything to even stick to the ground., yet there it was snowing anyway.  Of course I did what I always do for the first snow, dropped everything and went to Starbucks and got me a hot chocolate.  After this week, I can say that I definitely needed it to lift my spirits.

     Okay, I have babbled enough once again, bedtime for Bonzo here.  The week isn't over yet, and I picked up a shift Saturday night because of Brittany's termination (another 50+ hour week for me, yay!) so I am getting some sleep.  Nite everyone.