Three kinds of thieves

I remember talking to a factory manager, who was investigating a case of pilferage, many years ago. He said something I could never forget. He told me that there were two things you could never eradicate in any business organization, especially big ones with a lot of workers: stealing and drinking on the job. I guess he was right, and he still is today.

Pilferage in companies exists today and, depending on industry, is on the rise. The losses incurred as a result are tragically high. Sometimes you might think that people are forced to steal in order to augment their income, but that is not always the case. There are white collar crimes involving stealing in terms of big numbers as well, and the perpetrators of these crimes are people with high economic stature and income.

An article entitled Life’s Little Larcenies that deals with the kinds of thieves running around in our society appeared in Reader’s Digest in July 1997. Author Cheryl Downey reports that there is a rogue’s gallery of people who steal from all of us.

She says thieves are classified into the following:

The Magicians

They make things disappear and claim, “No one will miss it.” It is estimated that the hotel industry loses $100 million a year to guest thievery. People take toilet paper, shower caps, even bolted down TV’s and clock radios. One hotel manager caught a guest loading an entire room’s furnishings into a pickup truck! People who take things from the hotel many times rationalize it as taking home souvenirs. Frankly, I don’t care how it is labeled, but to hotel management, the acts are still labeled “stealing” and the registration cards would of course point them to the people responsible for the crime.

The Easy Riders

These are the people who cruise life’s shortcuts and ask, “Whom does it hurt?” These are the people who dent other people’s fenders and speed away grateful that no one saw them. We have a lot of Easy Riders in our country. Leave your car in the parking lot and by the time you get home, you discover an ugly dent and you have no idea where it came from.

Suppose you are the cause of the accident. You’re in a hurry and the driver is nowhere to be found. Simple. Leave a note or your business card and tell the owner of the car to get in touch with you so that you can fix the damage.

The Penny Pinchers

These are people who dodge LRT charges, alter their income tax reports and don’t feel bad cheating a “faceless corporation.” These are the people who will spend $2,000 for a satellite dish and then buy illegal descrambling equipment to avoid subscription fees.

They have at least three, four maybe even five cars in their garage inside a plush subdivision but they jump their wires so that they don’t have to pay a lot of money for their electricity charges.

The magicians, the easy riders and the penny pinchers: they’re everywhere.

In 1987 in Columbus, Ohio, an armored car spilled more than $1,000,000 on the freeway. People got down from their cars and went over guard rails to scoop up cash. Only a few returned what wasn’t theirs: Melvin Kaiser gave back $57,000. According to studies, if we know the people who lost the money, we’ll generally give it back. Otherwise, 75 percent of the time we’ll keep the cash.

I guess that’s human nature. The fallen nature that is. This is the reason why true integrity does not have anything to do with other people much less with what they do and what they say, it is what we would do even if we know that nobody would find out.

The reward of honesty is that the character of the person is strengthened every day. His stand on truth becomes stronger and he is unmoved with neither the pressures of circumstance nor the temptation of easy profit. He does the right thing even if he does not know the people affected.

The person who is a true Christian, meaning a follower of Christ is always a man of integrity. In Christ he now has a new nature. He may not know the people affected in a given situation but he sure knows his Savior. The motivating factor why he does the right thing is not out of fear for God’s wrath but out of gratitude for God’s love.

Well let me leave you with one easy handle whenever the issue of honesty is in question: just remember the Golden Rule. The bible says that we are to do unto others what we want others to do unto us.

This is the most practical of all ethical persuasions. But if you will allow me to give you my unauthorized version of the golden rule, it may be as simple as this: Do to others as if you were the others.

(Francis teams up with renowned speaker and author Krish Dhanam on May 15 in a whole day seminar entitled Achieving Peak Performance at EDSA Shangri-La Hotel. For further details contact Inspire at 09158055910 or call (632) 6310912.)