MikeBrum.com

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed some of my food was missing from one of my drawers. At first, I thought that maybe I was just not paying attention and was eating stuff faster than I noticed. Then the last of something disappeared and an empty box was left – this is something I know I would have remembered doing – which meant someone was taking my food.

Basically, I did what any good geek would do, I set up a webcam.

I positioned the cam under a riser my monitors sit on and made sure I could catch the drawer my food was in as well as the faces of people that walked by my cube. I downloaded a free webcam app that had a schedule (so I could time it for when I wasn’t in the office) and a good motion detection option.

With everything in place, this is what I found:

It was the night cleaning lady. She came in and emptied my trash, then swung by for a withdrawal. Looks like she had some dinnertime munchies (this happened at 18:52).

You can clearly see her opening the drawer, taking out a poptart and walking away with it in her hand.

After I got this, I immediately sent the images to my manager who forwarded them to our office manager. That cleaning person wasn’t allowed back into our office and the company contracted to do that work was notified.

Chances are, she wasn’t fired. My guess is that since they’re willing to work for very little that they just silently moved her to another building. I don’t “want people to lose their jobs”, but I definitely want people to be held accountable for their actions. Since she knew where to get my snacks, that means she had to have gone through my desk drawers to find out. It also means she’s probably done it to everyone else’s desks in the entire office. In two words: not cool.

At least people at that cleaning company know that “we’re watching” and will hopefully stay out of our stuff.