Who Was that Woman?

Just today at work I was walking out to go to the ladies room in the hallway. We keep the doors at work locked at all times, and we all have the swipe card things that we use to get in. I was walking out at the same time as a co-worker, and a woman walked in as we were walking out. I looked at the woman as she passed me, and watched her wander over to a cube. I assumed she belonged there, but it kind of bothered me that she didn’t look at me and say hello, and my spidey senses began to tingle.

“Hey, who was that woman?” I asked my co-worker in the hallway.

“I don’t know. But she looked familiar,” co-worker replied.

Instantly I was reminded of the time when I worked for a dot.com in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The building where I worked was an 18 story building, but nine of them were for parking. I worked on the tenth floor, which was the first floor that contained offices. We had the same set up, where the bathrooms were outside of the locked doors of the offices, and we all had swipe cards that we used to get in. We were strongly discouraged from propping the doors open for any reason, just as we are at my current office.

One afternoon an email circulated from HR which said that a number of my co-workers had their wallets stolen from their bags at their desks that day. Their credit cards were used on Newbury Street in Boston, which is kind of like the Rodeo Drive of Boston and houses expensive boutiques like Versace. I opened my backpack and saw that not only my wallet was still there, but my debit card was still in there as well. I breathed a sigh of relief and continued to read the email.

The Boston Police department had apprehended a woman who had stolen the wallets of my co-workers on the same day. The email, again, warned us about letting strangers into the building. I listened to my co-workers rumble about not having recalled letting anyone in. But I had to laugh when the Boston PD described the woman, and the description was relayed in the email.

Ahem.

She was a black woman who stood six feet tall.

She wore yellow, turquoise and orange clothes.

Yet nobody in my office recalled letting her in. That’s what happens when geeks don’t look up from their computers, or look beyond their pocket protectors.