The Feiquon Heist

by D. C. J Wardle

  For Kheng, the advent of the security cameras would have two significant impacts. The first was that it was no longer possible for him to slip out through the front gate at night and go home for his dinner. Once everyone had gone home, he had been able to peer through the manager’s office window and study the computer screen showing the view that was surveyed by the new technology. The only real way to get out of the compound unnoticed was to use his chair and put it up against the wall, right in the corner of the compound, as this part of the wall was not covered by the camera. He would then need to scramble to the top of the wall, and then climb down the small tree on the other side and onto the street. It was hardly convenient. Also, it meant that he still had to walk back, past the gates at the front of the bank which were now under surveillance, as his house was in the other direction to the climbable corner of the wall. Fortunately this was where the current ad-hoc road construction became a blessing in disguise.

  As a result of enthusiastically starting the major construction project but not finishing any part of it, the provincial government had ensured that there was a comfortably sized and totally dry drainage tunnel passing straight in front of the bank. As Kheng had observed at the end of the rainy season, the small pipes for the inlets had been clogged with rubbish and mud after the first significant downpour, turning the roads into rivers and ensuring that the drains themselves were the driest place in the town. All he needed to do was hop inside the gap where eventually they would build a man-hole cover, crawl a few metres through the large concrete-ringed tunnel that had been laid across the entrance of the bank, and pop up again at the next future man-hole gap before continuing on his way. It was a bit inconvenient, but the first time he did this he took an old broom with him and swept the dust out from the pipes. Otherwise, it added less than two minutes to his usual dinnertime journey, and after all he wasn’t bound by any particular schedule other than his wife’s cooking plan.

  The second inconvenience that the cameras brought was more psychological. They were very disempowering for Kheng. He felt like he had been diminished from the person that was respected and trusted to guard the provincial bank, to become someone that was being guarded himself. A computer was now basically considered more responsible for the security of the front gate than he was. Therefore, his motivation to be a dedicated member of the bank’s team waned considerably, and his work attitude reverted to that of an employee that was untrusted, and should just clock in, do the minimum and pick up their pay. As a result of this disempowerment, Kheng’s breaks for dinner started to become considerably longer than had previously been the case. Also, the added effort of negotiating the wall and the construction obstacle course left Kheng feeling compelled to stay at home even longer to have his dinner to justify the exertion. However, the new cameras were just the very start of it. It wouldn’t be long before even more radical changes to the established security system would be introduced.

  ***

  The day after the staff luncheon Mr Hua Lin had moved into Papa Han’s office. He had spent his time reviewing procedures and meeting staff. The second day Mr Hua Lin had sat at Old Papa Han’s desk, and scratched his head with despair in his attempt to eradicate the problem-induced itch. It didn’t work.

  Old Papa Han had had a reputation for being a bit archaic, and with this in mind Mr Hua Lin had accepted there would be a need to modernise a few things around the bank. He assumed there would be a need to make sure everyone was up to date on all of the bank’s latest policies. He would need to ensure the procedures regarding data entry on the computing system were all being followed, back copies of ledgers were made, and that all methods for checking the balances were in place. However, he did not expect to find that the bank’s security was so lax it was barely even guarded. There was one old man mooching around the compound at night. He had nothing but the chop sticks he ate his rice with to defend the bank in the face of a horde of thugs forcing open the gates. For Mr Hua Lin this didn’t really count as an efficient system. Worse still, in the daytime there was no security at all. People were coming and going with money, cash was moving from the safe room to the bank tellers, and yet with all that the only security was a belief that nothing was likely to go wrong because nothing bad ever happened in Maklai. There was no continuity to the security system. If something went missing at night then the guard would simply claim that it had happened before he got to work when he couldn’t be culpable. Besides, that would be a reasonable explanation. A daylight robbery was just as likely as a night time one. For a start, the door was already open, which would be of great advantage to any enthusiastic robbers, the clerks were moving around the cash, and the response time of the local police could be measured in days rather than hours. The risk for any would-be robber was minimal, so long as they wore a mask and weren’t directly related to anyone at the bank that might recognise them. In fact, it would be considered to be more responsible to keep their relative out of trouble than to report them.

  Lax security was one thing. A clear disregard of the labour law was yet another. The most that anyone could be asked to work on a weekly basis was forty-eight hours. If you added up the current quota of the old man who was doing the night guarding, he was probably clocking more than a hundred hours. This flouting of the law by such a well-respected institution had appalled Mr Hua Lin. It was totally unacceptable. If this type of disgrace found its way into the papers in Khoyleng the damage to the institution’s reputation would be unimaginable. The damage to his reputation would be unacceptable. There was no way that Hua Lin was going to allow that kind of scandal on his watch. This provincial appointment was meant to be a stop gap career move to give him a boost up the Khoyleng ladder; it could not become the reason for him to slip down to the bottom. Mr Hua Lin had decided to take immediate action. Getting everyone to follow the standard procedures was a given. After that he would overhaul the bank’s security system. He would then ensure his bank was following the letter of the law. That meant installing security cameras on the premises, and employing guards on eight hour shifts, each working less than forty-eight hours a week and with the right to annual leave. For this he would need a team of three regular guards and a relief guard. He began to plan the recruitment of the new team immediately, and started by drawing up a basic job description. The current guard would need one of these job descriptions as well. Hua Lin had gone through all the HR filing but it appeared that the guard had never been given one. How he had therefore been recruited in the first place was just one of the many mysteries that lingered with Hua Lin in the absence of Old Papa Han.

  12. Interviewing

  Mr Hua Lin had insisted on advertising the positions for the new guards almost immediately. By his second week in the job he was already interviewing candidates. The rapidity with which this took place was disconcerting for even the most forward thinking of the provincial bank’s long-standing staff. The very smallest changes to the established routine would normally take weeks to months to take effect. A re-ordering of a whole section of staffing by week two of Hua Lin’s arrival suggested that the new manager was ready to tear down everything and start again. Murmuring amongst colleagues about the new uncertainties became commonplace. Many were surprised that he’d not consulted the staff about this radical overhaul. Ordinarily, when institutions like the bank needed some bottom-feeder staff like cleaners or guards, then the word was put out amongst the staff to see who had a relative that would fit the bill. Usually someone had a brother-in-law who was looking for something to keep him occupied, or a sister who wanted some cleaning work now that the children were older. That way at least you knew the person came from a respectable family and it would help out an employee at the same time.

  Hua Lin had devised a very clear recruitment process with a very simple interview for the short-listed applicants to the position of guard. He had basically recognised it was very difficult to interview for the guard position. The talents that make someone a useful watchman for a sleepy provincial es
tablishment are difficult to measure through direct questioning alone. An interview for a financial manager or clerk was quite different. For these skill-based jobs there were technical questions to be asked. Tests of the ability of a candidate to understand ledgers were straightforward. There were ways to assess appreciation of accountability. Example scenarios could be discussed to explore how to deal with problematic customers. A review of aptitude and ambition was a conversation that could be initiated. It was all very straightforward.

  Guards, meanwhile, needed to be motivated by having very little to motivate them. They needed to be alert to the gentle passing of the meaningless and the benign. They had to be reliable at being awake when no one was watching. A day when nothing was achieved was a day when they achieved their task. It was a case of ensuring nothing out of the ordinary affected normality. In short, formulating a series of questions that could be posed to potential guards to assess their capacity in this regard was almost impossible. Indeed if such questions existed, and they were answered well, it would suggest that the aptitude of the applicant was far higher than the motivation that the position could bring. A mediocre answer was therefore better than a good one. Of course Mr Hua Lin was well aware that, with guards, the best way to identify a good one was through references. After all, the criteria of reliability, honesty, and good character were all part of a person’s reputation. This was not measurable by a deft ability with clever answers when questioned in an interview. Unfortunately, the references that could be gathered in a small town like Maklai that would indicate a person’s reputation were notably unreliable. They were usually from someone nominated by the applicant who was savvy enough to pick someone they were friendly with. Even if you bypassed their proposed list of character references and followed up with a village elder from their community, based on the address in their application, it would be very bad form for the elder to give a bad review. It wasn’t the customary way. Besides, the implications of being less than complimentary about a member of your own community to some outsider were considerably greater than giving a glowing reference for someone who was known to be lazy and dishonest and went on to do a bad job. The consequence of being viewed by one random employer of being an unreliable witness to an applicant’s character was a very minor concern compared with being responsible for someone in your community missing out on some gainful employment because of something you had said.

  Despite the considerable obstacles to producing a definitive system of assessing the perfect guard, Hua Lin came up with a series of three questions. The first reviewed their previous work experience. The second asked if they understood what the daily duties of a guard might entail. The third, and perhaps most telling of the three, enquired what they imagined their response might be, in the middle of the night, if they came across a miscreant scaling the back wall of the bank in a first step towards breaking in and robbing the place. The first two questions would weed out a few of the less likely candidates. However, for Hua Lin, question three was the real test.

  Eleven candidates had applied for the position and Mr Hua Lin had decided to interview all of them. After all, he needed to find three more guards if he was to conform to the national labour law and the bank’s policy. Even interviewing all of them would only give him over a one in three chance of finding the right people. He decided that Mr Tann would join on the interview panel to provide some local knowledge and increase the impartiality of the process.

  The first applicant to be interviewed was an elderly gentlemen. Hua Lin politely invited him into his office. He introduced himself and Mr Tann before proceeding to explain the interview process. It soon became very clear that the smiling grandfather sitting before him was not following a word that was said. Hua Lin motioned towards Mr Tann and provided a further introduction. The candidate leaned forward and slowly studied the face of Mr Tann before gradually lowering himself back down and releasing a loud and questioning grunt. From this Mr Hua Lin surmised that not only was it the hearing of the candidate that disqualified him from the guard position, but his failing eyesight as well. He immediately modified the recruitment process to include a basic pre-interview health inspection, where only those meeting minimum standards of functioning senses could proceed to the next level.

  The newly imposed prerequisite seemed to weed out a number of hopefuls, but eventually Hua Lin was able to resume his process of identifying those candidates with notable strategic and critical thinking skills that they could apply in the event of a night time intruder.

  The first health-checked applicant of the morning was a younger man who had just left high school. He answered question three by vowing that he would defend the compound with all his strength and fight the intruder to the death, with his bare hands if necessary.

  The second applicant was a middle aged man with a nervous laugh, who was clearly not used to being in a manager’s room, and he shuffled uncomfortably in his chair throughout the process. Despite his fidgeting, he was more pragmatic than the high school graduate, and suggested he would hit the intruder with a gardening tool. At the end of the interview, Hua Lin asked him if he had any questions. The shuffler pointed out that his son was now a policeman who had been issued with a revolver but he very rarely used it. In fact he had no use for it at night at all and would happily lend it to him. Therefore, his question was, would he be allowed to bring the gun belonging to his son to work with him? If an intruder should scale the wall in the early hours then he would be well positioned to shoot him several times.

  The third applicant was less fidgety but had a habit of tapping the table with his fingers at the start of each answer. He suggested that he would shine a torch at the intruder, challenge his presence and loudly sound the alarm.

  After the third interview Mr Hua Lin asked Mr Tann what he thought of the candidates so far. Mr Tann had thought that the man with the son in the police force sounded like he could be quite useful, and was by far the most impressive of the three. Hua Lin did not agree. In fact he felt that the degree to which their opinions were not aligned was significant, and he found Mr Tann’s observation a little concerning. The last thing they needed at the bank was the fatal shooting of some kid scaling the wall in an attempt to improve his chances of stealing the mangoes from the neighbour’s overhanging tree. This might be all the more sensitive if the bullets came from a gun that was unofficially borrowed from a local police sergeant. He pointed this out to Mr Tann. Mr Tann countered his argument by explaining that the first man had a reputation in town for being hot-tempered, and the third one was well known for getting drunk. In fact he had seen him get drunk and pass out at the wedding of the district governor’s nephew long before the karaoke had even got into full swing. Even with the risk of an accidental shooting with an illegally obtained firearm, the second candidate was still by far the best option of those they’d seen.

  Mr Hua Lin decided that Mr Tann’s judgement was even more questionable than that of the candidate that he was backing. He decided that he would do the interviews alone after that. He didn’t want his recruitment to result in a murder on the bank’s premises, followed by a complicated law suit that would inevitably focus on why the accused had been armed with a standard police-issue revolver.

  By the end of the afternoon and several more interviews, two new guards and a relief guard had been identified. Contracts were drawn up the following day, and a shift system was applied, based on one they used in a neighbouring province’s bank. Two days after the installation of the security cameras, Kheng was no longer the Maklai Provincial Bank night guard. He was now a shift-worker, one of a team.

  13. Shift-Work

  Shift-work didn’t really suit Kheng, and he wasn’t enjoying his first day of it. He was more of a ‘be your own boss’ and ‘have the place to yourself’ kind of person. Hua Lin had been in Papa Han’s office less than two weeks and this was the result. Imagine what this place was going to be like a year from now.

  Due to the new system, Kheng’s working da
y had started at the unusual time of six o’clock in the morning and would end at two in the afternoon. It was all wrong. It meant he’d miss breakfast, and would then have a very late lunch, which would no doubt play havoc with his digestive system. It would probably mean that he wouldn’t be properly hungry at dinnertime either. Apart from the meal side of things, it would also result in his being at home in the afternoon and he would get under his wife’s feet. Worse, he would still be there in the evening, which is when his wife liked to sit up talking with her cronies and hooting unnecessarily loudly at the day’s gossip. Normally she did this with her neighbour Mama Tae, or sometimes with one of her relatives if they came round to visit in the evening. If Kheng was there, she always started talking at him and wanted to make him be part of the incessant rattling. Over the years he’d forgotten to cherish the advantage that his night-job gave him in that regard.