That is what one would want to do to them, but of course it would not work out. If for no other reason than Sander seems like an good guy. If he were a general prick-face, then it would work. The screwed up way of the world.

Jeff

In regards to these things, you are quite right.
The employers in this case are classic with the "looking a gift horse in the mouth". Infuriating and ALL TOO COMMON.
They should be a little more hesitant to go through your stuff, if for no other reason than looking like retards the last two times. Unfortunately, that rarely stops anyone... from anything.

Jeff

Speaking from experience of having my own shop for a stretch while working full time for another bunch of upstate New Yorkers it's better I think if you cut all ties between their shop and yours. You are just blurring the line between the two doing this which gives them less hesitation suspecting you. Getting drops from them, worn out drills that they would throw away, ordering tools though them will only lead them to think you are pinching stuff from time to time. It's just human nature. If you were family or a long time employee of a small shop then they may not think it, but in a larger place there is someone stealing something all the time.

My former employer was a 10 man shop, down to me and another guy there on the floor at one point. I worked there for 10 years and was treated very well, basically a partner for a while. But things got weird as my time was winding down there. When they knew I had my own shop, there was always the occasional joke when they couldn't find something that it must be out at my shop. It was just in fun but way under the surface I think they gave it some thought. The missing item always turned up, just where they left it, or they never ordered it, etc..owner and formen were both in their late 60's and couldn't remember anything other than what was on O'Reily factor the night before!

Now quit worrying about it, go find some work, and get your own shop going gangbusters and get the hell outta there!

Anyone having a problem with tool crib security can take the approach that my company has: decide you don't care. Seriously, with everything these guys let walk out the door, sometimes I'm amazed we make money at all, not that I'm complaining. Anyone can have just about anything they want, short of pulling up with a trailer and loading up a machine tool. The official policy is if you want to borrow a tool like a cordless drill motor, just ask. Our manager is likely to say something like, " Just keep it, that one's pretty worn out and we were meaning to buy a new one anyway." We got a screaming deal on a whole pallet of cutting tools that someone cancelled the order on. $500 for hundreds of drills, endmills, lathe insert cutters, etc. Boss took me in the toolroom and told me, "Grab a drill and an endmill in every size that's here, for your shop at home. And any of that lathe stuff you can use." I guess the logic is if they give everything away no one has a reason to steal.

Oh, and full dumpster privileges are in effect. Often if the boss knows something is getting scuttled, he'll tell whoevers breaking it down to come and get us to see if we want anything off of it. Our Vice President will give us a heads up if anything good's getting dumped in the other departments.

Problem is, I like what I do here... and jobs of this nature are VERY hard to come by in New York. I paid down some serious debt, got a car on the road and stocked up on small machine tools in a short period of time so that gives you an idea of the pay here... another reason NOT to leave.



We decided to get two programmable vending machines in house for a trial. The controller on the ones I am looking can read employee time-cards so that'll give us a record of who is requesting how many of what.

It's a start, I'll keep you all posted as to how the machine trial goes.

I really don't see how that works for your company.

Every place I've worked, that type of policy would lead to rampant loss of materials and tools. Abuse would be the norm.

Employee theft, oh my, hard to comprehend.

I must confess to knowing of a few 350 V-8's "smuggled" out piece by piece.

The company did really start to clamp down after a few dozen complete 1/2 ton pickups were missing though .
Things can get really out of hand so many have good been given good reason to be suspicious .
Bob

Sander, I can certainly understand where you are coming from. Back when I was a student I worked at a department store in the vacations. I was responsible for the internal logistics - receiving goods and distributing them to the different stores. As I was going the rounds I would also collect their garbage to a central pickup point.

One of the shops had some employees who were quite casual about removing the electronic anti-theft alarms. Invariably some would always end up in their garbage, thus making the theft alarm go off every time I collected their garbage.

I just thought of this as a major nuisance until I was finished at work on evening and walked to my car. There I was approached by some polite representative for the appointed security firm, along with a not so polite manager of the aforementioned shop. They demanded to search me and my bags of food (bought dinner at another shop just before leaving). As my employee contract stated that the security firm could do just that I went along with that. Of course they didn't find anything. However, the manager had obviously worked himself into pegging me as a thief because he managed to smile and say that he would get me another day. What the F &%#!!?

Anyway, I didn't feel like doing him any favors anymore. So I went to the boss and explained that it might be best if the shop took control of their own garbage disposal. That way they wouldn't have to risk me coming into their shop at all. Which the boss agreed to. Being the only collecter around that effectively meant that they would have to make their own arrangements for the garbage. Which was my real reason.

But it got better - they were actually having a theft problem, and after I excluded me as a cause, they (likely wrongly) assumed it was some employee. Thus any removal from the shop, garbage or otherwise, was considered a risk. So just to be safe, for the rest of the time I stayed there the shop's manager or his daughter personally removed and compressed their garbage. Which was a decent lot. (Oh, and they went bankrupt within two years. Probably not from theft but from treating both employees and customers as likely thiefs.)

Anyway, above ramble aside, I thing the moral of your story actually is to not mix shop and home economy. Get another supplier of tools and materials, or simply ask the shop suppliers if you can get the same discounts personally, but shipped to you personally. They might very well run with that.

I'm pretty amazed about it myself. The only thing I can think is that the youngsters that we tend to hire are just too amotivated and apathetic to even steal, or have no interest in anything machine shop related in their off work hours, and thus have no want of anything we've got.

I worked for a hospital/university once where they were so tight that there was a major blitz on envelopes! The policy was that they could open any mail and if it was not official you got spotted. Pettiness and suspicion breeds a good work environment.... NOT

We've went the vending machine route. I don't believe that theft is really an issue, at least it's never been mentioned. But there is more waste than there should be with guys taking a box of ten inserts for an 8 insert tool and not using the spares next time etc. Because the machines read the employee time cards and we also create time cards to track jobs through the factory it means that a track can be kept both on jobs that are proving more difficult than expected and on employees that might need a chat to see if what they do can be improved. To put this into context, our insert bill runs at $65,000 per month, so a few percent saving soon pays for the vending machine,

Don't you just love that?!?! Everyone has to think they are John Wayne and Bruce Lee rolled into one and talk shit right to your face. Glad to hear they went out of business! Hopefully that guy got (or gets) testicular cancer.

Jeff

I've had places say they need a certain tool, would I go home and get it.

But, the bosses at the last place I worked knew better. I would borrow large taps ( over 1") and large reamers ( 1-1/2" +). I would tell them if I break it I'll buy you another.
They would always say "Don't worry about it, it's old anyway".

When I brought it back I would take it to the boss that let me borrow it and say " I want you to see it so the other workers won't say I kept it".

A couple of time I chipped a large 1-1/8" tap, or 1-1/4" and bought them a new one. They said don't do that but I did. My dad always told me if you borrow something and break it, buy them a new one, and he DID.They insisted that I keep the old chipped one.

After I bought them 2 new taps, I started buying my own when one was needed for a job. There was a little starting to come in .

There was a place I worked about 8 years ago, and they had a bad theft problem. There was a crack-head welder that was stealing a lot of small stuff.

Then the only machine at my house was a welder. No machinist equipment.

One time they were missing a boring head and I heard they were wanting to come to my house to look for it. I let word get back to the office real quick that it wouldn't bother me. Just give me time to call an attorney and go by the store to get new tapes for my camcorder. Also, were they going to go to everyone's house? Nothing else said.

They finally fired the crack-head. The manager had his brown-nosing delivery driver put something in the back of the guys truck, under a spare tire. Then they called crack-head to the office and said they heard from a witness he put something in his truck. The bosses went out there and found xyz???? in the truck. They told him to leave then and they wouldn't call the police. Crack-head was afraid of the police, so he sold his roll around box to someone for $100 and hauled a$$. Everyone was glad he was gone.

The big time major thief was found when they installed surveillance cameras. The owners 19-year-old grandson was going in on the weekend and at night and getting the stuff.

Sander, it always seems once you are "marked" they never look anywhere else.

If they have a hunch it is you, they never look anywhere else. All of their time is spent trying to prove it is you.

I've told bosses before " A thief thinks that everyone steals".


JAckal

" A thief thinks that everyone steals".

Thats so true,,it usually applies to liars and cheaters, as well,,

To the OP have it out with your employer and try and settle the issues you have or find yourself a new place to work,, If they respect you they will back off ,,if not get out will you can ,,

I have to agree with John here. We have two huge tool storage units that cannot be accessed without a code and has a tool crib attendant on hand all day. Once things are signed out though, who is to know where it actually goes because thee is no return policy. Once it is out of the tool crib, they don't care. Also, we 5-S the plant periodically and anything we don't need anymore goes into the dumpster including tooling, machine parts and anything noone has a use for. Last year, I and another guy was responsible fo clearing out our department storage shed. We compiled a huge pallet of old tooling, obsolete fixtures, machine, gauges, microscopes, etc. We were told to dump it and if we need to replace, we would just buy again. This guy Dave and I stood next to this pallet and figured there was easily 200,000$ worth of stuff and I was just about sick of the waste, but nobody was allowed to take anything useful. Then, a rather large drill press went missing, caried out of the plant after being removed from a small tool support area we had. We knew who did it, but couldn't prove it.

In addition we are also going to start keeping all screws, nuts, bolts and fasteners under lock and key as well. Recent inventory shows that someone is using us as a hardware store.

...and the Owner is cracking down on after-hours welding, no more "roll it in before the dock closes and clean up after yourself."


Can't say that I blame him, I dabbled in loss-prevention at Ames Department Store over a decade ago part time. These sorts of losses really add up quickly and if not controlled can lead to loss of contracts and eventually the failure of the business.

It is kinda funny...I used to work in a large machine shop, guys there with 30 years experience running massive IR horizontal mills, VTL's, etc. They could hold tolerances tighther than the spindle, they were good. But, they didn't know how to lift the hood of their car and paid to have their oil changed.

Back circa 1982-1992 (last time I was employed doing at least partly machine shop work for someone else), I worked for an electronics company. They tracked what we took, but to Job number 1000 - this was the job number used for overhead. Hardware they didn't even track

They just had one request - if you had a choice of say a plastic case IC, and the Mil Spec Ceramic case - please take the plastic case. The only "You can't take that" were things like Ceramic Case 8086s (yes, that was a 'hot' processor for that era) - they were like $3K/chip, where the plastics were like $100-200. If you NEEDED a ceramic case 8086, even for a production job, you had to go see either the director of the project, or the Sr Programmer - who had the tray of them in a safe in his office!

BTW - that $3k was in circa 1985 dollars, so you can guess why we tracked those...