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A few months after I began my epic carreer at the Shack, I had achieved the dubious honor of being the second key-holder. This meant there were two of us capable of opening and closing the store, my manager and me. And with great responsibility comes great sorrow, or something like that.
As the story opens, luck would have it that my manager was on vacation and out of town on this particular day. After a hard day at work I had gone to bed at my usual time and quickly fallen asleep. My dad woke me up at about 1am (I was still living at home at going to college part time then) and told me the Shack's security company was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. I went from groggy to fully awake in a fraction of a second as they told me that there had been a break-in and that the police were on-site and I had to get down there immediately.
A little bit of back-story - the police in question would not enter a business that had been broken into unless a keyholder was there. I won't go into the full story, but there had been some unpleasantness in the past (at another Shack ironically) that led to this policy.
I got in my car and began the drive to the store. It was only a 5 minute drive, but it gave me time to question my career choice.
I arrived onsite, and the police first made sure that I was indeed the keyholder. They then told me to go up and unlock the door. They had not entered the store yet, so they weren't sure that someone wasn't still in there. So here I am, walking up to a store in the dark, sirens are squeeling inside the store, and the police have their guns drawn while they are still behind me!
After unlocking the door, I backed off and let the police enter. There was no one inside, but there was a rather large hole in the back wall of the store. It appeared that someone had rammed a vehicle into the wall and left a 2 foot tall by 8 foot wide hole in our cinderblock back wall. The wall and floor were a mess. Oddly enough, none of the merchandise looked like it had been touched (and a later inventory confirmed nothing had been stolen).
So the police investigated what they could and then left. I had to wait - alone - in the store in the middle of the night for the masonry repair people to arrive and board up the hole before I could leave. Shacks can be a scary place when you're alone in the middle of the night and you're fully expecting the break-in idiots to return and finish the job.
They never did catch who did it, so we don't know for sure what happened that night. But our best guess is that the geniuses broke into the wrong store and panicked when they realized that they weren't actually in the back room of the drug store - the store next to us.
As the story opens, luck would have it that my manager was on vacation and out of town on this particular day. After a hard day at work I had gone to bed at my usual time and quickly fallen asleep. My dad woke me up at about 1am (I was still living at home at going to college part time then) and told me the Shack's security company was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. I went from groggy to fully awake in a fraction of a second as they told me that there had been a break-in and that the police were on-site and I had to get down there immediately.
A little bit of back-story - the police in question would not enter a business that had been broken into unless a keyholder was there. I won't go into the full story, but there had been some unpleasantness in the past (at another Shack ironically) that led to this policy.
I got in my car and began the drive to the store. It was only a 5 minute drive, but it gave me time to question my career choice.
I arrived onsite, and the police first made sure that I was indeed the keyholder. They then told me to go up and unlock the door. They had not entered the store yet, so they weren't sure that someone wasn't still in there. So here I am, walking up to a store in the dark, sirens are squeeling inside the store, and the police have their guns drawn while they are still behind me!
After unlocking the door, I backed off and let the police enter. There was no one inside, but there was a rather large hole in the back wall of the store. It appeared that someone had rammed a vehicle into the wall and left a 2 foot tall by 8 foot wide hole in our cinderblock back wall. The wall and floor were a mess. Oddly enough, none of the merchandise looked like it had been touched (and a later inventory confirmed nothing had been stolen).
So the police investigated what they could and then left. I had to wait - alone - in the store in the middle of the night for the masonry repair people to arrive and board up the hole before I could leave. Shacks can be a scary place when you're alone in the middle of the night and you're fully expecting the break-in idiots to return and finish the job.
They never did catch who did it, so we don't know for sure what happened that night. But our best guess is that the geniuses broke into the wrong store and panicked when they realized that they weren't actually in the back room of the drug store - the store next to us.
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