The Saga Of Luckless And His Crew

I worked at a Catholic college. A few years ago, I was working the dinner shift in the café, and since it was a little slower during those periods, I would also do things like inventory once a week and major stocking.

When I got out my inventory sheet to start that portion of my shift I noticed our back stock of retail beverages (bottles and cans) was way more depleted than normal; by that, I mean that we were short by full cases. This was very much not a good sign. Then, I moved on to our cases of chips to find the same problem. I figured it was a management error and wrote my manager a note saying so. 

Skip to the next morning, when my manager found all of our “grab and go” food items missing from the cold box and the packaging of those items was strewn from one end of our café to the other trailing out the main doors and onto campus.

Obviously, someone was getting in and taking whatever they pleased and were now getting pretty sloppy.

Color the crew (me included) baffled. We searched madly high and low for a way they were getting in to no avail until yours truly was in the ladies’ room. I just happened to look up at the skylight about thirty feet above me. The window was pried open and there were shoe marks on the walls. Oh, it’s on now! 

Step one: install a padlock to the outside of the women’s room. They can get in through the skylight, but not back out.

Step two: involve the very bored small-town police force in a stakeout.

Step three: wait.

For practical reasons, the staff of our little café were not invited to the stakeout, but from what I heard it went down about like this.

At about one in the morning, the police saw someone scale the wall to the roof — a freshman boy who we’ll call Luckless. Two more freshmen were spotted by the main doors; they’re the type that only lock from the inside, so one can assume that Luckless was getting in via the ladies’ room and letting his friends in. 

Luckless dropped into the ladies’ room only to find he was stuck, and when the cops unlocked the door with guns drawn and the whole bit, Luckless wet in his college brand sweatpants. (That is speculation; one of the cops told me this, but I think he was just trying to get a rise out of me.) 

Luckless’s friends were picked up trying to run back to their dorm room to leave Luckless with the blame. The dorm room in question had a ton of our product in it. They were taken to lockup where they spilled the entire beans, as it were.

It turned out that every year, as a hazing ritual for the men’s lacrosse team, the freshmen were sent to break into the cafeteria and take one thing to prove they’d done it. Luckless and his friends went through the hazing, found out how easy it was, and started breaking in every night and going hog wild on all of our merchandise. 

I guess we were pretty lucky these boys were so stupid. If they had managed to get into the walk-in, they would have found the sides of beef and twenty-pound boxes of chicken parts. But no, they just wanted cases of Gatorade and terrible, prepackaged sushi.

Sadly, the school dropped the charges on them when Luckless and crew’s parents got involved. Since I didn’t have ties to the actual school, I don’t know how all of that worked out. The weird part was, their punishment was to work in the very café they had robbed blind. 

We had those kids do the grossest jobs we could think of. Luckless had it the worst; he had to clean out the grease trap in the dish room after it had backed up. I’ll never forget the look on his face coming out of there, arms covered almost to the shoulder with grease and bits of month-old food clinging to him. 

No sympathy was to be had from the staff. In fact, the whole crew’s attitude was, “HA! That’ll teach ya!”