Unbelieveable gall

I work in an office with lots of stuff. If you've been to a major retail chain in the past 10 years, you've seen what I work on. We tend to take our product for granted, because it's work to us and we're surrounded by it all the time, but most folks have to pay for it. When we're finished reviewing/showing it we donate it to the company charity distribution center or we have a sort of sample sale and use the proceeds for a holiday party at a school for underprivileged kids. Other times we practically throw it at people as they pass by because we just don't have room for it anymore.

Well, recently somebody has started using our building as their personal free-for-all shopping center. They are brazenly taking clothes of racks and walking off with it. Jewelery, toys and some personal items have disappeared. To the average observer it might seem that we'd never miss a lot of the product because we have so much of it lying around, but we actually need it to do our jobs, so yeah, we've noticed. It's especially obvious when you walk in, on a Monday morning, to find 30 bare hangars on the rack where your samples used to hang. It's particularly creepy because this person seems to be carefully studying our work spaces. For instance, a pair of earrings had been split up and placed on two different presentation boards. Our thief stole an earring off each board to take a matching pair. The woman sitting next to me said a box of watches had been stolen from the far reaches of her cubicle behind several other boxes. Another friend had four hats stolen. She printed out pictures of them and wrote "Shame on you!" and posted it to the outside of her cube.

This whole thing makes me CRAZY! I can not stand people who feel entitled to do as they please with no consideration of others. I despise people who take without asking first. I'm still mad at the ass that walked off with my lovely display of clementines last year. (I feel a person should be able to bring a nice display of healthy snacks and expect it to be there when they return the next day. I wouldn't mind somebody taking a few to enjoy but the whole bowl?!) What kind of asshole are we dealing with anyway?

I've heard about some weird items disappearing in the past (lotion, food, telephone headsets, etc.) but the theft has escalated and is now making it difficult to do our jobs. Today, in a staff meeting, I learned that following a particularly large loss our security team is finally on the case and have installed "nanny-cams" around the office. (Genius!) One co-worker had a camera in her cubicle. She was instructed to just leave stuff out as normal. When she came back on Monday, as expected, things were missing. She alerted Security but they're being annoyingly discreet so she didn't know what happened. She feels certain they got someone on camera but she just doesn't know who. I CAN'T WAIT to find out who the thief is. We'll probably never know. The one thing I do know is that if you've done something REALLY unethical you're promptly escorted out of the building. I call it "a professional hit" because that's how fast they disappear. One day you're setting up a meeting with someone and the next their office space is cleared out. It's weird. I suppose all we can do is wait for the next hit to guess who the thief is. And no, we don't think it's the cleaning crew. Everybody habitually blames the poor cleaning crew but they are rarely the culprits. This is someone that works with us during the day. Thousands of dollars of product has been stolen in recent months. I hope this person is not only caught but prosecuted.

I'll keep you posted.