My $17,000 Lesson: How I Accidentally Robbed my Job
The day was July 7, 2023. It was friggin hot outside, my car could barely make it five minutes without overheating, and I was one mediocre excuse away from quitting my job. That is, an excuse beyond the daily ordeals that were way above my $8/hr pay grade.
It was this random Friday at 5pm when the cafe would receive a phone call that would bring an end to my time as a barista. I heard my coworker answer the landline and a few seconds later she was with me in the back. “The police are on the phone,” she said.
I was caught off guard, since at that point I didn’t even know the police could call people. “...cool,” I said.
“They want to talk to you,” she added, and my stomach dropped to the floor.
“Me?” I said.
“Yeah.” She shrugged, “They said something about fraud.”
“Fraud!?”
I never talked to the police before (except for that one time I ping ponged my car between a fence and a lamppost) and wasn’t exactly interested in exchanging with them anything more than a nervous passing ‘hello’ but this didn’t feel like one of those moments where I could just say, “nah, I’m busy washing all these dang forks.” So I said “yeah...yeah, sure,” and she nodded and returned to the front. After taking a moment to suppress my panic, I rolled up to the front, picked up the landline, and was introduced to “Lieutenant” Pearson.
Pearson knew everything about me. My name. My phone number. My date of birth. How long I’d been working there. And Pearson said that my boss, let's call him Rick, the owner of the coffee shop, had personally asked for my help with an investigation into a series of fraudulent cash deposits from the coffee shop over the course of the summer. He explained that while I handled things on site, Rick would be taking care of things at the station, and we’d all meet up in a couple hours.
Pearson gave me his badge and phone number in case we lost contact. He also explained to me that the investigation was extremely confidential, and if I shared any of what we were doing, I would stand the risk of going to jail. At this point, I remember sitting on the phone, listening to him say all this, and thinking to myself, “Wow, I can’t believe this is actually happening.”
Pearson asked me to take the cash drawer down to the office and confirm whether there was $300 in it. Sure enough, I counted $300 from the cash drawer. However, apparently this did not meet the amount of fraudulent cash deposited by the coffee shop, and I would need to pull money from other sources.
“How much money do you have in your account?” he asked.
Now, normally the answer to this question would be anywhere between $3 and $8, but I happened to be holding the money for the house my roommates and I had just begun to rent the month prior. A total of $1700.
After a promise that I would be getting all of my money back in less than an hour and a reminder of the possibility of jail time, I was convinced into adding the $1700 from my bank to the $300 from the cafe to make a $2000 total wad of cash that I would be carrying around with me for the rest of the night, trying to come how transfer it to the financial crimes unit of the police station.
Now, I don’t exactly have time to get into the details of everything that happened in those next few hours, but let me just tell you this: I, a 22 year old black woman, drove from store to store in the most crime ridden parts my city, alone and in a car that had no right to be on the road. So, of course, I questioned my own survival more than a few times that night.
By the fifth hour mark I had switched into my friend’s car (thanks to my own car overheating and blowing up the coolant tank) and was so over it that I risked jail to send a very cryptic but entirely necessary text that read:
I’m about to have a melt down. Answer the phone when I call you.
Come eleven o’clock, I was on the verge of tears in a Walmart parking lot forty minutes away from my house. The wad of $300 cash from my job was sitting in my lap and my manager (we’ll call him Jack) would not stop calling me. So I told Pearson, “Listen, before I go anywhere else, I need to call my boss back.”
And Pearson says, “Okay, but keep me on the line. And then afterwards we'll have you meet me down at the station.”
I said ‘fine’ and then called Jack.
When he answered, it sounded like I had just woken him up. “Knia?” he said, “What’s going on?”
Lieutenant Pearson dropped out of the call.
“Oh, hold on,” I said, “I need to get him back on the line.”
“Get who back on the line?” said my manager, “Knia, where have you been? Where’d all the money go?”
I tried calling the number back. It went straight to voicemail. My panic was beginning to mount. “I can’t legally say,” I explained, trying again to call him. “Ask Rick. He knows what’s been going on.”
“I’ve been talking to Rick,” said Jack. “He doesn’t know anything about this.”
On the other line, I got a message that the number had been disconnected, but by then the truth had already begun to settle in. If my gut dropped to the floor before, this time it dropped to the center of the Earth. “Tell me this isn’t happening,” I murmured.
“Let me come meet you,” Jack said, trying to sound calm. “Where are you?”
I all but screamed into the phone, “I’m 45 minutes outside of Chattanooga, Jack! Tell me I didn’t just rob my job!” And then I burst into tears, because I absolutely had.
Thankfully I still had enough to pay back the $300 I had inadvertently stolen from them, but there was no getting back the $1700 of my own money that I had lost in those six hours. And even when I went to the real police to file a report, they informed me that there was unfortunately nothing they could do about it, and it would just have to be something I would have to keep in mind going forward. I quit my job the next day, if not for the trauma of the ordeal then for the insanity of it all, and am still to this day trying to figure out a way to pay back the money that I lost, with a college wage.
Certainly a $1700 lesson to be learned.
Strike Out.
Writer: Knia Robinson
Editor: Sarah Singleton
Chattanooga
