Stupidity!

[JEZGUZ]

A young bloke at work, mid twenties I think, just got sacked. He was knocking off tools from work and then flogging them off on facebook is what the management have said. Loss of job and problems with references due to theft, never worth it for the few hundred quid he might have got out of it.

 

[Richard.]

Happens a lot. We had the same problem at my last place of work but was difficult to prove so the management had some gear deliberately marked so it could be recognised on a photo, then bought it. Needless to say the person got a shock when the boss knocked on the door to collect the item.

 

[eSCHEn]

Boggles my mind.

There was a programme on the idiot box last night about pound shops. Same deal, staff member lost their job for nicking a quid packet of asprin.

 

[CompoSimmonite]

One of my sons mates got sacked from Alton Towers - for eating one of the donuts he's made that wasn't fit for sale due to size / shape !

 

[ford34/2]

Yes happens with "out of date food" you cant have it,eat it buy it. Missus couldnt even chance eating a sweet from a broken /damaged packet of sweets etc. Yet stuff gets nicked as often as the day is light, car boots,E bay, Gumtree. theres never an answer, The climate and hard times we all live in and an easy buck. Who will know who can ever catch me attitude.
We visited Monaco just a few weeks back, we were told there is one Police officer to 60 residents, zero unemployment, zero crime and dont put a foot out of place as every street or walkway is CCTV monitered. Zero Tax for anyone born in Monaco. A police station what seems to almost everywhere just a wee office serving the Local police in that area.
On much the same note, Our plumbers chucked the back boilers into the company skip, I used to go out at dinner times and unscrew the 28mm fittings out, I was given a verbal warning backed up in writing for stealing company materials. --YES

Stan

 

[daleyd]

I used to do work at a place in Scarborough where the maintenance manager got the boot for selling stuff from work on eBay.

They found out cos they needed a Plc card and the shift sparky went to get it out of stores, nowhere to be found. They were deep in the cack and there was no supplier who could get them a card so in desperation they tried eBay, one came up for sale with a Scarborough postcode!! A bit of digging found the miscreant manager out and it turned out he had loads of stuff on there!!

He threw away a 50k a year(I don't know for sure but it must have been in the ballpark) job and all his accrued pension etc, not to mention the criminal charges, for probably a few grands worth of pilfered gear - madness!

 

[Tinbasherdan]

Lad in the shipyard made a killing nicking atlas copco windy tools and selling them on eBay, they estimated he had sold around 45k worth of gear before he got caught. Our windy grinders were detuned to conform with our HAVS regs, and apparently the only place that did so, so when atlas copco were asked what the deal was with them by whoever was buying them off eBay to refurb and sell on, it was easy to work out where they were coming from. Apparently has 3 lockers across the yard stuffed with gear when they caught him, including some computers which really would have done him in if they had anything secret on them

 

[Keith 66]

I think nearly everywhere i have worked someone has been at it. My first job in 79 at Thames Marine (boat factory) was an education, thieving was endemic to the extent that it must have had an effect on the buisness as a whole. Three guys had a thriving buisness building 9ft dinghies, one nicked the gelcoat & resin & laid up the hulls, another cut the glass, the third fitted them out, bear in miind this was 45 gallon drums of gel & resin...... every month or so.
Second job a load of my tools got stolen when i was off work with a busted arm, In a funny twist i did find some of them in someones tool bag years later at another yard & got them back, Hard to argue when my name was stamped on them!

 

[ms08]

Wasn't there a story in the press some years back about a guy or a couple of them who virtually smuggled a whole luxury motor cruiser out of the factory they worked in bit by bit and were assembling it at home...nearly had it built too.

 

[Robotstar5]

There was a bit of an uproar when an artic trailer full engines disappeared off site, security now open the back doors on every van & lorry leaving site.

 

[the snooper]

Wasn't there a story in the press some years back about a guy or a couple of them who virtually smuggled a whole luxury motor cruiser out of the factory they worked in bit by bit and were assembling it at home...nearly had it built too.

when I worked in the caravan industry years ago all one of the machinists house needed was an A frame one you got inside it looked like one of the top range vans we made

 

[Hitch]

I bought some drill bits through work years ago, tool guy dropped them in for me.
Boss came over, "What have you got there?"

Some drill bits, dont worry, they are booked down to me on the invoice.

"Why did you buy them?, why not just take them from here like everyone else!?"

 

[brightspark]

security guards on minimum wage . yea righto its suprising what can disapear if the price is right

 

[the snooper]

security guards on minimum wage . yea righto its suprising what can disapear if the price is right

and does disappear

 

[Wendelspanswick]

Wasn't there a story in the press some years back about a guy or a couple of them who virtually smuggled a whole luxury motor cruiser out of the factory they worked in bit by bit and were assembling it at home...nearly had it built too.

 

[Keith 66]

The one piece at a time was actually done not a million miles from here, a mate of mine used to run a company that as a subcontractor laid the hulls up for a large luxury yacht. He was talking to the MD one day & said, "Pretty good year, i have laid up 30 (say) sets of mouldings in the last year" MD replies "no it was only 20". It turned out that no less than 5 complete moulding sets had left the yard at the crack of dawn bound for a farm in the middle of nowhere. There to be fitted out by a selected building crew. So each director had a rather large bonus as it were!

 

[Highway_Star]

One of the wife's previous jobs. The warehouse manager was responsible for inputting hours into the computer for payroll purposes. He was also ******** one of the office girls. It appeared both him and her were doing wads of overtime... But the alarm logs didn't tally with the hours he claimed they'd worked.
He was also responsible for deciding what was warehouse damaged goods and unsaleable. (It's a flooring and worktops distributor).

T'boss happened to be round their house and noticed it floored with the most expensive stuff the company had... Oddly enough a quantity had got 'damaged' earlier that year ....

He was sacked in the end.

Daft part is the firm were pretty generous, staff got a good discount on floorin getc, they paid cost +5% and could borrow a van in lunch hour to take it home. This placed is floored in 21mm hand finished golden oak, cost us less than carpeting the living room was going to be!

 

[ronan]

The company i was serving my time at was great, no one would take anything of anyone elses. Loads of borrowing went on but it was always fine. We all had tool chests and no one ever bothered locking them. But then there was a spate of tool thefts, mitutoyu micrometers and verniers, some of my britool spanners, sockets sets etc. all sorts of good quality tool walked and despite all the traps set the tea-leaf couldn't be nabbed.

One of the lads came out of the canteen early after lunch one day and low and behold there was a pakistani character who had been taken on as a general labourer, sticking tools in his overalls and making off with them. The guy who seen him went and got the other lads and cornered him and found he was hiding the tools on shelving upstairs no one ever went near. It turns out he was nicking them and sending them back to his family in pakistan !

One of the guys he had stolen from was a bit of a lunatic, he didn't see the funny side and battered him .

 

[The Devils Reject]

The only pilfering I was ever involved with was years ago when I had a part time job at Woolworths. One night me and my mate were restocking the pick 'n mix and decided that we would have a little snack. So there we were, stuffing them little marshmallow bananas in our gobs like there was no tomorrow. The manager came down to see how we were getting on. He asked us if we had been eating the sweets and we both mumbled that we hadn't.

It wasn't until he'd walked away that me and my pal looked at each other and realised we both had icing sugar smiles...

 

[ibrooks]

I used to work as a security guard (for a company that became famous for losing prisoners). I went to cover a shift at a car manufacturing plant in Ellesmere Port because a few guards were off sick. I got there and it turned out the shift supervisor that day was also a stand in so the first thing we both did was sit and read the assignment instructions together (list of what we did and didn't do on that particular site). One of the things we did there was searches so he turns to one of the regular guys and asks how they decide who and where they are searching expecting an answer like we toss a coin and then play "snooker" (search a red coat and then a coloured coat - modify for current fashionable colours or similar) - but no, the guy responds "it's Wednesday and we always search at West gate on Wednesdays". The supervisor was looking right at me and said he saw my jaw literally drop at the answer. So that afternoon at shift changing time there were a line of guards stood across East gate. The mob of people coming out sort of did a double take as they walked down the access road and then almost came to a stop. About half of them turned back whilst the rest bunched together and as they approached there were car parts being dropped or thrown from the midst of the crowd. No-one had anything by the time they were actually searched but there must have been three tables full of stuff by the time we'd picked it all up. As I finished for the day the supervisor was sat with his head in his hands almost wishing he hadn't done it because they were now basically going to have to admit that they had been pretty much allowing that much stuff and more to go out of the factory every day for years.

On my regular site it wasn't unusual for us to be presented with correctly signed scrap notes for 8'x4' sheets of Perspex. I felt guilty one day when I asked one of the supervisors for a note for a couple of lumps I'd pulled out of a skip. I had made enquiries and been promised a 2' square of Asterite for a top for a wrought iron table I've still got but I left a couple of weeks later so never did manage to get it.

Where I work now we got a message one day some years back with a list of people from the main site that we weren't to talk to if they phoned us. It wasn't likely that they would contact us as the site is over 200 miles away so we don't exactly socialise. It turns out that there had been some goings on between certain of "our" people and some of the customers own people whereby they were ordering IT and related kit from us and signing for it but it was being "installed" at their houses. There were a few people sacked and a couple actually sent down when the investigation was complete. The account manager was apparently cleared of involvement but resigned as it had happened "on his watch" so to speak. I could never understand as, like others have said, they had thrown away well paid jobs, pensions, security clearance and a massive amount of earnings potential for a few thousand pounds worth of what amounted to home entertainment kit.

Iain