About bloody time



I was eventually fired but it took them long enough.


I used to work in a petrol station/car dealership. I had the evening and weekend shifts while my mate did the weekday shifts. The bloke in charge was either this religious zealot who looked like Monty Burns and was equally cranky or else an old army sweat who didn't give a shit but was only doing it to top up his pension. There was no CCTV and no other security so someone had to man the pump office constantly. This suited me perfectly.

I used to have to get the set of keys so I could go to the toilet - this involved opening two sets of doors. The idiots had the master keys for the entire place on the one keyring. So, I'd open the main office and pilfer from the petty cash box - more like a petty cash treasure chest really as most of the business was run on a 'cash in hand' basis to avoid Mr. Taxman getting his share. I doubled my wages most weeks in this manner. I used to go into the car repair section and ransack the glove compartments for anything of value - mostly cassettes that I'd take home and tape over them. I also swiped tools that the mechanics had left lying around and gave them to my brother.

My brother and his mate both had cars made by the dealership so they were never in want of spare parts. I'd get the details of the part they required, enter the storeroom, grab the part, exit via the side door and stash it at the far side of the sales lot. By the end of my shift, my brother would come to pick me up, park at the far side over by the sales portakabin, creep round the back and collect his prize. How I wasn't caught is still a mystery to me - especially the night I wandered across the forecourt with a chrome sports exhaust kit cradled in my arms. Or the night my brother, myself and my mate who did the dayshift swiped an entire rear suspension and hauled it outside. I also used to steal hundreds and hundreds of gift stamps and empty booklets. I'd spend my shift filling the booklets and then handing them out to my family who'd take them to another petrol station across town and claim their reward. My parents still use the fine china dinner service and lead crystal glassware twenty years on.

I was there for over a year and loving it but, as always happens, it had to come to an end. The head of the family that ran the garage retired and handed over to his son. The son was a Thatcherite 'weakest to the wall' cunt who used to 'road test' customers cars by driving the wheels off them and treated the new cars on the forecourt as 'his' to be used/abused as he pleased. He wanted to stamp his authority on the business by shaking things up. Everybody knew he was watching them so were on their best behaviour. Everybody but Fanta that is who was too busy daydreaming and plotting yet more pilfering to take any notice. So, one evening, the boss screeched to a halt at the pumps and said "Fill her up". As I did so he started bantering with me, taking the piss out of me as he usually did, I gave him some backchat as I usually did and he went off to the office to put the petrol 'on account' - not that he ever paid for it mind you. I wandered in after he'd left only for Monty Burns to tell me "This is your last night, the boss said you were rude to him and that's not very customer friendly is it."

Still, I had the last laugh. Turns out that my pilfering was decidedly small scale compared to one of the salesmen. He'd been fiddling the car sales figures for years and, as his wife worked in the accounts office, she was covering it up and had some VAT fiddle of her own. They left the country with a sack marked 'Swag' to start a new life in the sun leaving the company owing a lot of money and facing a severe tax audit. The family had to sell the business and it was levelled to make way for apartments.
(Fanta Menace Is tall enough to see over the fence, Fri 10 Aug 2007, 11:00, Reply)