driving force

Sunday I woke up at 7:30am and reached over to check my phone messages, as is my usual morning routine. I had three missed calls from numbers I didn't recognize, from 1:30am onward, and one voicemail message. I sighed and figured someone was calling in sick for Sunday as usually is the case when I get calls at that hour. I listened to the voicemail twice through before I could understand what the heavily-accented voice said: store #2 had been burglarized early Sunday morning.

The message was from the center's security office, letting me know the police were on scene, and I could please come down and talk to them? I called the security patrol's office back and tried to find out more details but the lead patrol officer was out, er, patrolling. I raced to get ready to go to the location, foolishly putting on sandals. Who goes to clean up shattered glass in flip flops?! Me, apparently.

I arrived about 20 minutes before my father did, allowing me to take a good look at what had gone down. The good news is that my new point-of-service system was still there, and everything else I could quantify. We learned the hard way many years ago at a different location to leave register drawers open (no cash inside, obviously) after closing so that would-be thieves wouldn't have to break equipment to see there was nothing inside. It was still horrifying to look a all the broken glass and realize...there wasn't a damn thing missing that I could quantify. Nothing.

The glass repairman will arrive tomorrow morning, as we had to special order tempered glass. I'll be glad when things are back to normal, even if I'm still wondering if this marks us as an easy target.