This Is Next-Level Thievery

I come walking into my office area one morning, and my supervisor and one of the other floor managers are talking. They chat with me around all the time, so I get to hear interesting things that happen around work.

The other floor manager tells my supervisor that he was up on the mezzanine early this morning because he’s trying to find some tools that he knows for sure are here, but he hasn’t been able to locate them. (There’s a rumor going around work that some folks have been stealing tools, but nothing definitive has been proven yet.) He said when he was up on the mezzanine he noticed a few shelves in the back corner that were sitting away from the wall, but there was no way to look behind them without actually moving one of the shelves.

So, he moved a shelf so he could see behind them. The area behind the shelves was maybe a five-foot-by-five-foot space — not very big — just enough room for a small desk, chair, and computer. To his surprise, he found a computer that was up and running, and connected to it was a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and the computer was plugged into some kind of cable box — his words; what he was talking about was a twenty-four-port switch — that had a lot of cables in it.

He checked the computer by moving the mouse and the monitor woke up, and he was now looking at the CCTV software and a dozen different cameras that were currently active on the screen. He had some experience with the CCTV software and noticed that whoever had been using this computer had access to the drives that store all the video, along with access and control to all the cameras. He tells my supervisor that they’ve been having issues with some cameras “going out” in certain areas; they come back on by themselves sometimes or they have to reset the CCTV system to get them to reboot. He’s now thinking someone has been deliberately disabling cameras so you can’t see what’s happening and possibly even deleting footage.

My supervisor and the other manager call out to the IT guy. They relay all the information to him.

IT Guy: “So what? I don’t care. It’s not my job to secure that computer.”

My supervisor knows I have computer experience and that I’m fixing computer issues all the time because our IT guy sucks. She asks me what I think about the IT guy’s response and asks what we should do about the computer.

Me: “At the very least, the computer needs to be password locked, and only owners and management that normally have access to the CCTV system should know the password. Next, since the computer is plugged into the switch and I don’t know who okayed it to be put there, I wouldn’t move it, but I would at least take the mouse, keyboard, and monitor off of it. After that, let ownership decide what needs to be done.”

The next day, the IT guy came walking through my office area and he was pissed. He had to go up on the mezzanine to unhook the computer and remove it from the system. He was complaining to my supervisor about it and how it shouldn’t be his responsibility to handle this issue.

Surprisingly, once that computer was removed from the network, the cameras were no longer “going out,” and the issue with missing tools had dropped dramatically.