Thursday 18th September 2008.
This week has been a bloody nightmare at work but first I want to tell you all about Rent.
If you haven’t seen it, get it, it’s absolutely brilliant.
I groaned when Sal lent it to us, another over acted, all singing all dancing rock opera. The first five minutes did nothing to change my mind. I figured it was going to be Gilbert and Sullivan meets Gilbert O’ Sullivan then pops round to John Bon Jovi’s for a joint and a Jack Daniels.
And then this song, that may have been called, Let Me Light Your Candle, was performed and I was hooked. Russ didn’t get that far and was asleep and literally snoring in my lughole within five minutes. At least I didn’t have to hear him tell me “It’s only a film,” when I bawled like a baby but it did kind of ruin the experience. Sal’s waiting for it to play at Manchester and the three of us (her, me and a box of tissues) are going to see the stage show. The sound track is fantastic and I’ve got to have it.
Marty surprised me last week, he finally admitted to his theft of the bottle of vodka. This is the first time ever that he’s backed down on a story once he’s talked himself into a corner. He told me that he realised that for six quid’s worth of vodka it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Of course I’ve asked him to replace what he’s stolen and although the bottle wasn’t full I’ve said that I want him to buy Russ a complete bottle in return. He still vehemently denies stealing the ninety-five pounds last month. I had a dilemma. Where’s, The Perfect Guide to Successful Parenting, when you need it, oh yes, Marty flogged it to buy a packet of fags. I told him that the thieving had to stop and then I was at a loss. Should I punish him? This in itself leads to two problems, the first being that any punishment inflicted is very hard to police and maintain. Marty would just laugh in my face and refuse to be grounded or given chores. Secondly this is the first time he’s ever admitted to doing something wrong. Normally when he’s lied, and it makes no difference who to, be it me, his brother or the police, he stands his ground and will not back down no matter how damming the evidence against him. If I tried to inflict heavy punishment for his crime then next time he’s done something wrong he’s going to revert back to prior form.
I tried to punish him with the good old-fashioned penance of guilt. Hell, I’m the queen of guilt. I was born guilty and have blamed myself for allowing it to happen ever since. I told Marty that he wasn’t brought up to steal. I asked him how he’d feel if I took to taking things of his? I lectured him calmly and quietly and could see that my words translated as, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” He suffered it for five minutes and then told me he was going out.
I let him go.
I know by the nature of the beast that all teenagers are selfish but lately I really have been given cause to think. I keep coming back to the same question.
Where does being a normal, self-absorbed teenager end and sociopathy begin?
Marty has no conscience but is clever enough to wear one that he keeps in the back of the wardrobe when the need arises.
We have a mystery. It’s a mystery that isn’t playing fair. The rules state that when there is a mystery to be solved there are ‘this many’ clues to follow in the correct order that lead you to a neat solution. In this case there are no clues and no satisfactory solution.
I’m going to adapt the quote by Mr Holmes to suit my cause here… mainly because I can’t remember the exact wording of the original, so I borrow and edit and say, when the probable has been eliminated only the improbable remains.
I worked as always until eight o’clock on Saturday night. I checked the week’s takings and they were perfect to the penny. Daz and Sal had swapped shifts and Sal was working ten till four on the Sunday.
I saw her on Sunday night and she was buzzing. She told me that the Monday morning drudge of paperwork/banking/and sending the weekly sheets off to head office was going to be a breeze because she’d got the head’s up on it and had done it all. All we had to do was take it to the bank Monday morning.
I asked her if everything was in order and she told me that she’d checked everything twice and it was all correct.
This made life so much easier for Monday Morning. We truly do hate Mondays. There is a lot to get through. I’ve usually been out until the early hours and generally we’ll hit upon some number crunching error that always gets sorted out when we trace it back to its source but is a time consuming pain when it happens. She was so chuffed with herself that she even told me not to rush in on Monday morning because she was opening up.
I told her not to do the banking until I got there because I didn’t want the shop being closed. As it happened I was in on time. It didn’t feel right to take advantage. Because the morning’s work was all done and ready to go we put some DVD’s out and cleaned the shop so that it was ready for morning trade and then went out the back for a coffee and a cig.
Just after ten the phone rang.
“Hello? Miss Doe? This is, So and So Sacractic Knickers, from Kendal Magistrates court. Does that ring a bell or mean anything at all to you?” Well the Kendal bit threw me, but yes, the cloud was lifting and I was getting that awful feeling that you get when you realise you should be somewhere important… and aren’t.
Not only was I not in court at ten o’clock as I should be, but I wasn’t even mentally prepared for it or dressed appropriately. I told the man that I’d be there in five minutes.
I sat, non-too patiently in the witness room for nearly three hours. Just when it looked likely that the day would be adjourned for lunch and I’d have to wait even longer the usher came to call me in.
It was all very anti-climatic. I sat in the same courtroom as the two thieving witches who stole three dvd’s worth fifty pounds from my shop. I gave my evidence and we watched the cctv footage of them. The film clearly showed them stealing the goods. The defence blokie made a huge deal about the bags being identical…
Er, yes, apart from the fact that one was dvd sized and one was suitcase sized… and then he tried to claim that the entire unfortunate episode was a terrible mistake on the women’s part and had caused them no end of discomfort and humiliation.
They shouldn’t be light-fingered harridans then, should they (I didn’t say that.)
“Isn’t it entirely possible, Miss Doe that my client might have picked up the second bag along with her own by mistake?”
“It doesn’t look that way to me or to the police woman who watched the tape with me. I would say that the film clearly shows wilful intent. But allowing that it might all have been a big mistake, why then, when they got outside the shop and realised that they had goods on them that did not belong to them and that hadn’t been paid for, didn’t they come straight back in and return them?”
Touche!
“Would you?” he shot back at me. I don’t know why he said that because it seemed a stupid question to ask.
“Of course I would,” I replied, “In fact I did once. I remember years ago walking out of a shop in Morecambe with a bottle of washing up liquid under my arm. It was only when I got outside that I realised that I hadn’t paid for it. I went straight back in to pay.”
“No further questions.” They actually say that.
I was released and was quite disappointed to not be allowed to sit in on the rest of the case to find out what was happening.
And then I walked into bedlam and chaos.
Sal was in the backroom surrounded by pieces of paper. She had her head in her hands and began yelling and screaming and throwing things around.
I went to do the banking, and when I got there it was a hundred pounds down. I checked it yesterday. It was okay. I don’t know where the money’s gone. I’ve spent the last three hours going through the sheets. It’s just not there.”
“Calm down. It’s okay, it’ll only be a number crunching error and we’ll find it.”
“Jane, it isn’t. I’ve been through it time and again. I’ve had the shop upside down in case I’ve dropped it.” That much was clear. The place looked as though we’d been burgled, “It isn’t there.”
I asked her to pass me the paper work and then I exiled her into the shop because she was doing my head in. I spent the next couple of hours going through the paper work every which way.
She was right the money had simply vanished.
We do make mistakes. The till is often ten pounds out one way or the other but when we go back through the figures we always but always find it.
Not this time.
I was annoyed that Sal had actually banked. I said that she should have brought the money back with her. She explained that by then it was too late because the teller had already stamped it so she had no choice but to bank a hundred pounds light.
One way or another that money had to be banked, I took the hundred pounds float out of the till to buy us time to think and went myself to bank it. I knew that I was going to have to explain why the banking had been done twice, the first time a hundred pounds light. My hopes of sorting this mess and finding the missing money without head office being any the wiser were slipping away.
Sal explained that she’d taken the sealed envelope of money that morning and zipped it upright into her inside jacket pocket. There was no way that five twenty-pound notes could have fallen out. A professional pick-pocket might have been able to do it but he’d have taken the full wad not just one hundred pounds out of two thousand. There was no way that she’d lost that money between the shop and the bank.
In the bank the teller counted it three times. Sal counted it along with her and agreed with the teller that it was a hundred pounds short. The teller then called a senior member of staff and they counted the money a further two times.
In all the money had been counted eight times. I’d counted it once and it was correct. Sal had counted it twice and came to the same figure. Then it had been counted five times in the bank totalling the lower figure.
When I went back to the bank I explained the situation again. I said that I very much doubted that they’d come up with anything because Sal had counted the money along with the teller and the manager and had come to the same conclusion but if, on the slimmest of chance that at close of day the teller’s till was one hundred pounds up then it was ours. The bank, Nat West, was fantastic. The woman said that the teller was on her lunch break but as soon as she came back they’d close that till and total it. I apologised for the extra work we’d created and said to make sure that the teller knew that we didn’t doubt her in any way and that Sal had agreed with her figures, but that this was our last chance of finding that money. The bank was very understanding.
The lady rang me back within the hour and it was, as we feared, they didn’t have our missing money.
Had somebody been into the shop overnight?
I have a key, Sal has a key and Danny has a key.
We checked the cameras.
I left the shop on Saturday night and nobody stepped over the doors activating the cameras until ten on Sunday morning when Sal opened up. The same Sunday night until Sal opened again on Monday morning.
I am quite sure in my own mind that Sal didn’t steal that money. Forgetting the fact that I trust her implicitly she’s not stupid. She was the last one to see that money intact. Obviously all eyes are going to point to her. She wouldn’t know at the time that I’d be reluctant to call it in to head office and as I said to her if I thought for one second that she’d taken that money I’d have sacked her on the spot.
Sal is not a thief, she is however slap-dash and disorganised. She’s clumsy and a bit lapsidaisical. I could quite easily picutre her with a bundle of twenty pound notes in one hand and a screwed up piece of paper for the bin in the other putting the notes in the bin and the rubbish on the table. We went through the bin … it wasn’t there. We looked under tables where she says she did drop some notes on the Sunday but had picked them all up. Nothing. We checked everywhere. The money was gone.
I have no idea where that hundred pounds went and can’t find an explanation that fits.
Daz hadn’t been in since Tuesday and the money was right and checked by me on Saturday which lets him completely off the hook, thank God. I don’t completely trust Daz and was glad that he had no part to play in this.
Sue checked the money twice on Sunday and it was correct which let’s me off. Sal is not a thief and I don’t think that she took the money. So what the hell happened to it?
It’s the first time in two years that my till has ever been significantly out in either direction with lost money that can’t be accounted for.
Now I had two choices. The banking had been done and although it was done in two transactions the money was as it should be, but my till was currently sitting one hundred pounds down.
I could go down the official route and call in head office. Procedure in circumstances such as these is simple. The shop is shut. The staff is put on garden leave. I understand what that is now. You are sent home with pay while a full investigation is carried out. It’s not quite a suspension but is as good as. And then an auditor comes in and turns the place inside out until the discrepancy is uncovered. It wouldn’t look good on our work records.
I have nothing to hide except perhaps incompetence but am terrified that if head office gets wind of this they’ll start digging and decide that I’m not up to the job that I’m doing. I have few qualifications. I’m not a clever woman and before getting this job quite by accident I had no managerial experience.
Rightly or wrongly I decided to take the second option and deal with this situation in house.
Up until this point I had done nothing wrong. I was squeaky clean and an investigation might have found me lacking in competence but my honesty would have held up against any scrutiny.
The decision I made could well cost me my job.
Sal disagreed with me and said that we should go down the correct channels. I over ruled her.
I didn’t want her involved in what I did next. I take full responsibility for it but I did want her to act as a witness, so while she was still in the shop I took over the till. I didn’t ring in or record the next hundred pounds worth of sales so making the till right. My stock is now a hundred pounds down.
I made a list of the sales that hadn’t been recorded and have stuck them up on the wall, so that if the shit does hit the fan and I have to explain myself head office can instantly see that I have accounted for that hundred pounds. When I get paid on the twenty seventh of the month I’m going to get Sal in again and with her watching I’m going to ring the sales into the till and pay for them. Hopefully that will be an end to it and everything will add up and be correct.
But…. All it takes is for somebody in control at head office to check over the cameras and see what I’ve done and I’m as good as gone.
Yes, I’m pissed off that somebody else’s incompetence has caused me to have to pay one hundred pounds out of my wages. Sal couldn’t understand it and asked why I was so scared of being investigated if I have nothing to hide. I can’t understand it so I can’t explain it. I just know that I’d rather risk everything and put my job on the line to avoid an investigation when I’ve done nothing wrong than admit to head office that money has gone astray and I have no way of explaining it. In the last ten weeks I have made the company fifteen thousand pounds more in gross profit than I did over the same ten weeks last year. I am good at the moment and am getting positive scrutiny from Tom the company owner. I don’t want that to come crashing down. I want to be seen as the best manager. I want to earn bonuses and accolades. Tom sent me through a memo last week asking if I’d like to apply for a Regional Manager’s job that had become available but it was Southern based and no good to me, but it was nice to be asked and thought of. I don’t want to be put on garden leave and investigated even though I’m innocent, does that make any sense? I can’t be a failure. For the sake of a hundred pounds I’d rather just cover it up and bury my head.
On Monday when the money went missing I had nothing to hide. I haven’t stolen anything but in my attempts to cover up I’ve done something extremely dodgy that would probably cost me my job anyway. I’m absolutely crapping myself that what I’ve done will be discovered before the twenty-seventh when I can put it right.
And then I justify it. Tom told me to manage so I’m doing just that. I’m managing. I had a problem and I’m sorting it without running to head office with my tail between my legs. I am responsible for the shop, the stock and the money being right. The money wasn’t right so I’ve sorted it and footed the bill out of my own pocket.
Of course if this ever happens again in similar circumstances then I’ll have to accept that something dishonest is going on and will have to turn it over to H.O.
Maybe I just make life difficult for myself.
Russ is doing my head in again. He has one of his regular man-colds. I hate it when he gets these. He isn’t hygienic about containing his germs and everywhere he goes a pile of snotty tissues follows him. It’s disgusting. At the first sniffle he ceases to be a man and becomes this whinging dependent little dressing gown shrouded ball of snot. He buys every product on the market and is mainlining eccanacia and Lemsip. Okay, he hasn’t quite got a drip set up yet but if I suggest it he will have. He pops paracetamol by the handful and is driving me nuts with his theatrical moaning and groaning.
He wants to hold my hand in bed and after all that nose blowing I really don’t want him anywhere near me. His touch feels contaminated and he will insist on breathing all over me, despite telling me a hundred times a day, “I caaand breeead.”
But I love him.
No doubt, in a day or two when he’s feeling better I’ll be sitting in work feeling like absolute crap and cursing him to hell for passing on his nastiness. It’s the first one of the season but he seems to come down with a new cold every week right through the winter, batten down the hatches, here we go.
Winter is upon us again.
