Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove out there at six-thirty with a folder of yellow work order carbons, because I have kept the carbon of every work order I have ever written in that building, and there were eleven of them about that one camera.
I asked for Dean Ostrander in Human Resources, who I have known since his daddy ran the tool crib, and I laid the carbons on his desk in order.
March 2022: camera 6, locker room, no picture on the monitor. June 2022: same. Two in 2023. Four in 2024. Every one of them signed by me and stamped received by the office and never once answered, because nobody wanted to spend money on a camera in a room full of old hands nobody suspected of anything.
Then I put down the twelfth piece of paper, which was not mine.
It was a service ticket from Bortner Alarm and Camera, dated in November, for a system-wide replacement of four dome units including camera 6, work performed and warranted. They came out on a Saturday under the corporate contract, did the whole building, and nobody at this plant told anybody. The floor manager had been there since February. As far as he knew, that camera had been dead for three years, because that is what the old-timers all said in front of him, and he never checked.
It had been recording the whole time. Thirty days rolling, on a box in the electrical closet that I sweep around twice a week.
Dean called Bortner at eight. A young fellow drove out from Bucyrus and pulled it up on a laptop in that same office with the door open, and it took him about six minutes to get to Tuesday.
At 2:14 in the morning a man in a contract crew vest walked into that locker room, put his hand on the top shelf of an unlocked locker, and walked back out. Clear as a photograph. You can read the name on his vest.
He wasn’t one of the young guys on shift. He wasn’t me. He was the crew lead from the outfit that manager had brought in to bid on our jobs.
The plant manager called the whole first shift together in the aisle by receiving on Friday. He said the man’s name, said the contract was dead, and said that twenty-eight years should have bought me one question before it bought a guard at the door. The floor manager was gone by the end of the month.
They gave me nine days of back pay and a new set of keys.
And Dean did the thing I appreciated most, which he did quietly. He had all eleven of my work orders copied and put in the maintenance file with a cover sheet, and he wrote one line on it.
Eleven times this man told this company something was broken. Nobody read it until it was the only thing that saved him. Read the work orders.
They fixed the light in the east stairwell in March. First time in nine years. I’ve got the carbon.