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 sits in a strip on Lake Avenue between a nail salon and an insurance office. The 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 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, and every one of them went into a folder in an office where nobody reads anything.
Ardith read them. He fixed it in March on a service call for something else, closed it out on his own ticket, and never billed 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 system, on their retention, 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 exactly why nobody thought about it at all.
Ardith pulled the night in question while I stood behind him with my hat on my knee.
The pallet did not walk off. 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 with 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 up there nine days with nobody’s name on it.
And the release was countersigned. The signature at the bottom of that bill 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 a thing. He just never looked at what he’d signed, and it was faster to hang it on the old man than to open a folder.
Ardith had written something on that 2023 work order when he closed it out. It’s still in their 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 came about eleven months later.
They asked me back on a Tuesday. The security manager apologized on the floor in front of the same crew that watched him take my flashlight off my belt, and then he went on to whatever’s next for a man like that.
My keys were in a drawer. The thermos was up on the shelf in the guard shack where the night crew had set it, and when they handed it back somebody had gotten it engraved at a trophy shop, crooked, with my name spelled right and the year wrong.
I have never told them how long I sat in my truck with it.