Excitement

For once, today everybody at work seemed on the same level. It takes unusual events to make that happen.

In this case, it was an order from a non-existent customer. The company has been bitten by this a few times recently, and it's a good scam. The man phones and places an order for expensive goods to be delivered to a building site on account, giving the name and details of an infrequent but account-holding customer. Then disappears with the goods, leaving the real customer to protest that they had nothing to do with it. Neat, and difficult to prevent without alienating the usual customers who like to be able to order such things without jumping through security hoops.

Today, one of the staff recognised the voice and mobile phone number, even though the man gave a different name and company to before. What's more, the man wanted to pick the goods up. So he got a cheerful "certainly". Then the company he claimed to be representing was phoned, and rapidly after that, the police. With a little badgering, the police were kicked into gear, and sent some officers along in plain clothes. They arrived a little after the miscreant himself, who had been kept waiting with the excuse that the stock needed picking, but once they did arrive they were left to the job while the warehouse staff happily blocked his van in with two forklifts.

Predictably, when confronted from the other side of a counter, the suspect made a break for it, and ran off down the hard shoulder of the dual carriageway hotly pursued by the police whose plain clothes fortunately included trainers, while the company staff goggled from upstairs windows. He had enough of a head start that I doubt they would have caught him if it hadn't been for a Methodist minister in a Land Rover who thought the sight looked odd and pulled in to collar the fleeing criminal. That was the last any of us saw of him as the police procedure was all performed down the road.

However, one of the police came back for their own vehicle and to see to the abandoned van of the arrested man. It had no tax, no insurance, and the license plates were fixed on with elastic bands. Interesting.

What happens now, I have no idea, but it made for light relief from a standard day at work.

There isn't much relevance to the standard theme of this blog, really, except that it made me think that it needs something very odd and external to the usual run of events to overcome the sense of there being two classes of people in the company. That's something I am uniquely qualified to observe as I hover uneasily at the boundary between them. The upper class try hard to remember that I belong to the others, but it's difficult for them except unless something brings it forcefully to mind. And the warehouse staff are very aware that there is a very low glass ceiling that prevents their advancement and any increase in their level of privilege. Only when everybody is strongly focused on something outside, as they were today, do they forget the differences and huddle together in a crowd.

I can't help thinking that it's a good thing to huddle and look outwards occasionally.