Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, drove down to that gate, and kept right on going, because the man I needed was not in that building.
Tri-County Surveillance is in a strip on Lake Avenue between a nail salon and a State Farm office. The service tech who covers our account is a fellow named Ardith Ganley and he has been climbing ladders in that warehouse since 2011.
Here’s what a new security manager with six weeks in a building does not know. That dock camera died in the spring of 2021. I wrote it up. I wrote it up again that fall, and again the next year, and again the year after that, eleven work orders total, and every one of them went into a folder in an office where nobody read anything.
Ardith read them. He fixed it in March on a service call for something else and closed it out on his own ticket and never charged us, because he said eleven work orders from the same man deserved an answer from somebody.
And that camera does not record to our building. It records to their cloud, on their retention schedule, under their account, thirty days back. There is not one soul on our property who can reach in and touch it, which I imagine is why nobody thought about it at all.
Ardith pulled the night in question while I stood behind him with my hat in my hand.
The pallet did not walk. It rolled out door six at 4:12 in the morning on a legitimate outbound, loaded by a legitimate crew, onto a legitimate truck, on a bill of lading that had the wrong customer number typed at the top of it.
Somebody in the office keyed a six where a five belonged. That pallet went to Toledo instead of Findlay and sat on a dock there for nine days with nobody’s name on it.
The release was countersigned. The signature at the bottom of that BOL belongs to the same man who stood in front of my night shift and told me I could sign a resignation or go out in handcuffs.
He wasn’t stealing anything. He just never bothered to look at what he’d signed, and it was faster to hang it on the old man than to open a folder.
Ardith wrote something on that 2023 work order when he closed it out, and it’s still in the system, and the operations chief read it out loud at the Monday meeting:
“Fixed. Tell your night man to keep filing them. Somebody eventually reads one, and the day it matters he’ll be glad the paper exists.”
The day it mattered was about eleven months later.
They asked me back Tuesday. The security manager apologized on the floor in front of the same crew that watched him take my flashlight, and then he went off to whatever’s next for a man like that.
My keys were in a drawer. The thermos was on the shelf in the guard shack where the night crew had put it, and when they gave it back to me somebody had gotten it engraved, badly, at a trophy shop, and I have never once told them how much that cost me to look at.