Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove out there for the twenty-five years of service lunch, because it was on the books and nobody had told me it was not, and because a man who has never been late in twenty-five years does not start on his last Friday.
I did not go in to make a scene. I went in because Ruthie from HR had ordered a sheet cake with my name on it.
What I did do, on the way, was stop at the Kinko’s on Wagner Ford with a piece of paper.
Every door in that building runs on a badge. Mine has been the same number since 2001, and the system logs every read with a time, and there is a reader on the compactor yard gate because the insurance company made them put one there in 2019.
I know the system logs it because I am the fellow who reported the reader on the dock door going bad in March, and I am the fellow who walks with the maintenance contractor when he comes, and I am the fellow who has watched him pull those reports on a laptop a dozen times.
The money went missing between 11:40 and 12:15, which the manager himself said out loud in front of everybody, because he wanted it to sound like a police show.
At 11:36 I badged out the compactor gate. At 12:22 I badged back in. Forty-six minutes on the wrong side of a locked steel door with a bad ballast in the light out there, which I had also written up, twice.
I could not pull that report myself. Ruthie could, and she did, at nine that morning, before the regional people landed.
They handed the plaque to me at the lunch anyway, because the plaque was ordered in January. The regional director read the little paragraph off the back of it about dedication and reliability, and the room clapped, and then Ruthie stood up and asked if she could add something to the record.
She read the badge log. Times and doors, no commentary, in a flat HR voice, and then she said one sentence: this employee was outside the building for the entire window in question and was asked to resign anyway.
The regional director asked the floor manager, in front of a room with cake in it, who else had break-room access that night.
It came out over the next week. A twenty-year-old kid on the dock, who took it out of a locker that was not locked because the latch has been broken since 2022, which I had written up three times. He came to my house on a Sunday with his mother in the car and told me himself, and he was shaking so hard he could not hold the coffee I gave him, and I did not press charges and neither did the company.
They asked me back with the twenty-five years intact. I went back for eleven months and then I retired on my own terms in the spring, which is the part I wanted.
The floor manager is not there anymore. I did not ask about it and nobody offered.
The plaque is in my hall. The badge log is in the drawer underneath it, and I intend to keep both, because a man ought to be able to prove he was where he said he was.