Wanted to share a true story from when I worked in retail. This happened about ten years ago.

While at school, I worked part-time in a petrol station (or gas station, for our American comrades). Opening hours were from 6 AM to midnight, although anybody who wanted to make a little extra cash—usually the full-timers with families—could do ‘on-call’. On-call meant if a security alarm got tripped while the place was closed, you climbed out of bed to investigate why. The inside of the store had motion detectors that were SUPER sensitive, so these things tripped non-stop, usually because a loaf of bread fell from a shelf or something.

My co-worker, Alice, was in her early fifties and five-foot-tall. She lived nearby, so ‘on-call’ meant a two-minute drive to the station. Easy money.

One night, after getting called out, she drove over, pulled up the shutter, and went inside. Nothing seemed out of place in the front. Using her key pass, she unlocked the storeroom. Inside, there were two more doors: one leading to a staff canteen, the other this tiny cleaner’s store, barely large enough to shuffle around.

Since everything seemed normal in the main space, Alice checked the canteen. Still nothing. The only place left was the cleaner’s store…

She wandered over, grabbed the handle, and then, from the corner of her eye, spotted a fizzed-up bottle of coke on its side. A likely culprit for why the sensor tripped.

She logged the incident, locked everything up, then went home.

The next morning, the supervisor noticed an out-of-place ceiling panel and plaster on the floor. In the office, he scrolled through the overnight security footage. It was an old system that took ages to find anything since you could only skip forward in five-second increments.

It turned out a thief had broken into the restaurant next door—a subway—where he found nothing worth stealing. He then climbed up into the roof space, crawled along, and dropped into our storeroom. In the slideshow footage, he was wearing a balaclava and holding a hammer.

Now here’s the real kicker. Because the storeroom had a secure door, he couldn’t get to the front where they kept the money. He spent fifteen minutes trying to find a way out before Alice arrived. When he heard her coming, he rushed into the cleaner’s store to hide, knocking over a bottle of coke along the way—the same bottle Alice noticed when her hand was LITERALLY on the fucking handle of his tiny hiding spot. If she’d opened that door, she and the thief would come been face-to-face.

When she found out what happened, she quit on-call. Three others did too. Head office threw a fit because suddenly they didn’t have anybody to cover the shifts. There was talk of disciplinary action and then dismissal, but nobody cared. Eventually, the subject got dropped.

Crazy.