Busy Body’s Diary (Friday - 15 Dec 2006)

Time : Thursday 14 Dec 2006 12:00 p.m. (lunch time)
Place : XXX food court near Jo’s office.
What happened: Jo went out for lunch with Pig Pig. Pig Pig paid for it.

Time : Thursday 14 Dec 2006 1:00 p.m. (after lunch back to office)
Place : Company cafeteria.
What happened: Pig Pig went to buy a can of orange juice after back from lunch.

Time : Thursday 14 Dec 2006 8:00 p.m. (dinner time)
Place : YYY restaurant.
What happened: Jo and Pig Pig went for dinner. Jo paid for it.

So can you guess what’s the significance of the above data on who paid for which meal at what time?? Well in a CSI case, this can well become important clues for investigation. Let me tell you about the coming up CSI story…

Time : Friday 15 Dec 2006 8:00 a.m. (before going to work)
Place : Jo’s residence.
What happened: Housemate Pig Pig informed Jo that she couldn’t find her wallet.

Time : Friday 15 Dec 2006 12:00 p.m. (lunch time)
Place : Office
What happened: Pig Pig confirmed that her wallet is not in her office drawer.

This triggered the CSI investigation. Now by rewinding back on the previous data, the wallet was last seen during Thursday lunch time where Pig Pig paid for lunch at XXX food court and potentially also after lunch time where Pig Pig went to buy a can of orange juice from the company cafeteria.

So the suspected locations :

1) XXX food court where Pig Pig may have left the wallet on the table after lunch. One thing for sure was that Pig Pig brought her wallet out for lunch
2) Company cafeteria where Pig Pig left it at the cash counter. However Pig Pig couldn't be sure that she brought her wallet to the cafeteria.
3) Pig Pig’s office drawer. She usually dumps her wallet in there without locking the drawer (damn careless!!!). Someone took it from the drawer.
4) Dropped inside the car.
5) Somewhere at home.

The excluded location:

1) YYY restaurant. Jo paid for dinner, Pig Pig did not take out wallet from her bag. However the wallet may have been missing by that time which Pig Pig was not aware of it until the second morning (damn blur!!!)

So Friday lunch time, Jo and Pig Pig went to search and asked people at all the suspected locations. Unfortunately nobody seems to have seen it. It’s not inside the car, also not found at home. So how to proceed with the investigation? Jo thought of a cool idea. Our crap company spent lots of $$ to install CCTV everywhere in the company to spot people digging nose, sleeping during working hour, walking without tucking in the shirts, went to cafeteria for too long etc. So why don’t we play back the tape and have a look? Now the question is ‘what time’ and ‘where in the office’ to check on the play back??

By the way, besides the CCTV, our crap company also spent lots of $$ to install card swiper everywhere in the company to trace the time and location of each employee. So the smart security guards dug out the swipe in and out time records on Pig Pig for her lunch period on Thursday. It shows a swipe out from company entrance time at 12:00 p.m. and swipe in to company time at 12:47 p.m. There they played back the tape on swipe in time to check if she has the wallet in her hand when she came back from lunch. Wow, so high tech, just like CSI!!!... I was excited to watch the play back but hold on… the tape was so blur. Basically it looks like the VCR head has not been cleaned for million years. The security guards ‘pai seh pai seh’ told us that the tape has been reused and reused for 6 years++!!! Oh my goodness… it’s hopeless. Basically what we saw are two shadows that look like Pig Pig and I walking towards the entrance but we couldn’t see other details. Damn, if the company can spend so much $$ to install the camera, why can’t they afford to buy some new tapes!! After replaying it for few times, we decided to give up on this.

So the conclusion was to call the bank to stop transaction on her credit card and ATM card, and to go to the police station after work to report lost. However we have a birthday celebration dinner for our friend Thea on Friday night. So we decided to pick another friend PP up and went to the celebration dinner first and after dinner only we went to the police station. The reason was what had happened had happened, report to police is not as important as having dinner…hahaha. Why?? It’s because the police here are hopeless, they won’t do anything except give you a police report so that you can go to do a replacement for the lost IC, driving license etc.

So we went to dinner and there we started to drink beer and thought of stories to tell the police. We figured if we told them the wallet was lost due to carelessness, the police may refuse to file the report, so we concluded that we should report it as stolen by pick pocket. Before we went to the police station, Thea and Ling gave us some mint candies to kill the alcohol breath…hahaha.

We have previously visited the same police station few months ago when Thea’s bag got snatched. At that time, the policemen there were busy watching the World Cup so they were quite reluctant to process the case. They suggested Thea to report the snatch case as ‘lost’ instead of ‘being snatched’ so that they don’t have to initiate an investigation. We ended up letting them writing the story themselves and we just sat there to join them watching world cup at that time.

This time, PP and I decided we will do all the talking for Pig Pig and Pig Pig just played a pitiful victim as she can’t speak Malay. We immediately reported ‘lost’ and the police there immediately started to write the story without asking us much on the incident details. That saves us the effort to tell the made up pick pocket story. This time, the tv there was showing ‘Titanic’, so we again joined them to watch the show while waiting for one officer to write the story.

Upon completion, he showed us the report which basically just listed the lost items. We were okay with whatever he wrote as the whole point was to get a police report to do driving license and IC replacement. However, the stupid policeman ran into some technical problem. The printer refused to work. He moved to use another computer but there was no network linkage to that PC so the data can’t be linked. At the same time, we observed that the other printer was even worst, stuck with bunch of papers there don’t know since when, it’s basically paper jammed. We helped them to take the jammed paper out. The policemen there were kind of embarrassed but they explained the computer systems were newly installed and the printers have problems.

Ok ok ok… in order to speed up the process, PP and I volunteered to look into the technical problem. Basically we do this quite often. Ended up we took over their seats, I kneeled down to check the cable connection, PP checked on the printing. There PP found out there was a whole list of unprinted items due to printer error. PP cleared it out and I reset the printer but it still didn't work. As I saw the other printer was jammed with bunch of paper stuck there, I figured the printer must have problem to take paper when there is one whole stack of paper. So we tried with feeding one piece by one piece and eventually we managed to get the report out by ourselves. I joked to charge them for fixing the printer problem and the 6-7 policemen there started to laugh in embarrassment. I suddenly have a new idea for part time job, I joked to them to call us up to fix the problem and we will charge them accordingly.

When the report was out, the stupid policeman couldn’t find the stamp to stamp it. At that time, I felt like finding the stamps for him and do the stamping ourselves too!!

Anyway when we walked out from the police station, 3 of us couldn't help but laughing like hell. Basically we ended up 'taking over' the whole police station in that 1 hour time, where all the policemen just stood there watching us fixing all the shitty problems. They are just not so good at computer at all, as well as preparing reports, as well as catching thieves, solving crime cases etc. I wonder what they are good at, watching World Cup and Titanic??

Basically this ends my busy body story II… quite an interesting visit to the police station for the second time.