Unfiltered Story #96491

Our self-service restaurant has four departments: warm kitchen, cold kitchen, sweet kitchen and service. The service department where I work, is concerned with the counters, the coffee bar, the drinks, cleaning up the dishes and working the washing-up room.

Some colleagues apparently don’t like work which involves food leftovers or doing a lot of lifting and walking: every time they aren’t doing counter or coffee-bar they try to switch with one of their coworkers. One coworker did this in particular, although their wasn’t anything new about that. Also, when going on a break, we were supposed to pay for our food (having an employee discount) but aforementioned coworker always said she would do so later. Although that was in fact illegal, it wasn’t that weird to us, since lots of coworkers used to do this in case there were long lines at the counters. At some point, however, it struck me that this coworker ALWAYS said she would pay later, but I never saw her doing that. Not wanting to be a snitch, I decided not to care – I was quite sure she wasn’t the only one.

One day, we were expecting aforementioned coworker to show up, but she didn’t. When one of my colleagues went to check, our manager told us she wouldn’t working anymore. At first, I thought this might be only today, but it turned out she would never be coming back again. Soon I heard why and it really explained to me why she was so fond of being at the counter all the time. It turned out she had been stealing money for about 9 months, managing to steal about €3000,-! So much for “paying later”.