One Christmas Eve we found a big sack in there full of carefully wrapped presents labeled to ‘Johnny from Mum &Dad’ and to ‘Sally from Mum & Dad’. Not enough information for us to return them in time for the big day I’m afraid. Even Santa Claus needs a postal code. I hope ‘Dad’ had an understanding family or that would be a recipe for a pretty unpleasant Christmas morning.
The cleaners were going mad about the stuff they had to clean up in there after the weekend. Our lost property locker quickly expanded into a lost property room. After one particularly wet week in November we ended up with enough umbrellas, hats and coats to open a market stall. Every couple of weeks the office messenger would take the lot down to the Oxfam shop – if he didn’t the stuff would have taken over the entire branch. Soon Oxfam were doing so much trade they expanded into the empty premises next door and were in danger of moving into the supertax bracket.
Then some extremely unsavoury items started to turn up – used needles. The leftovers from injecting hard drugs. Next thing we knew, we were collecting more hazardous waste than the local hospital
This was the last straw for the cleaners.They insisted something be done about the situation or they would go on strike. That was when the spy camera was fitted and the fun really began…because apparently the good citizens of Wakefield & District really didn’t care if they were being filmed or not.
The spy camera was connected to a special slow motion video recorder. The recording quality was not brilliant but you could certainly tell what was going on, and just as importantly, who was doing what with whom.
The staff turned into a bunch of voyeurs – this was Real Life TV way ahead of its time. On Monday lunchtime we would gather in the staff room. While drinking coffee or tea and eating lunch we would put the tape on fast forward search and stop it if anything interesting happened. We were rarely disappointed. One pair of young lovers used the place for sex every weekend – if they came into the branch during normal hours the counter staff would spontaneously start to sing “Some enchanted evening, I will shag my true love…” Their exhibitions only ceased when they were cautioned by the police.
Once when we were watching the tape, Julie (one of the typists) recognized her brother in law. He wasn’t alone but accompanied by a young woman obviously dressed for a night on the town. And she wasn’t Julie’s sister. They both looked more than a little tipsy.