Monday, June 29, 2015

Follow-up To Maintenance Man Found in Balanced Exposure's Storage Area

I filed a police report with Schaumburg Police Department concerning the incident from June 26, 2015.

After emailing our building management again and determining that this maintenance person was with Harvard Maintenance as a cleaning staff and not hired by Hamilton Partners (who manages our building), I was told that he gave neither Harvard nor Hamilton Partners a valid reason as to why he was in our office either.

To me, it's pretty clear that his intentions was not in doing maintenance work but rather to check out our space to see what could be stolen.  Because of this, I felt it was important to call the police department so that a record of his intrusion into the Balanced Exposure's office space would be on file and that if he ever tried to do something like this again at another company's location, he'd have a record at the police department of having done this before in the past.

While Hamilton Partners have banned him from working at our building, he is not their employee, so there's no way to find out if his employer (Harvard Cleaning) has released him from their employ or not.

Hamilton Partners will be installing new locks for my office as a result of the incident.  In addition, I will now have security every day escorting me to my vehicle as I leave the building, thanks to Hamilton Partners.  Great!

Friday, June 26, 2015

"Maintenance Man" Caught In My Storage Room At Balanced Exposure



Well today was rather interesting.

I walked into my school, Balanced Exposure, around 1:45 PM to find a young hispanic male in the backroom of the school.  He took me by surprise as I was not expecting to see anyone in the office space at all.

I asked him what he was doing there and he said that he was with the maintenance company for our building.  Well, I've never met him, so how would I know if he was telling the truth or not?  Plus, I had never heard of the maintenance company that he claimed to work for.  I only know our building's maintenance person that's been with the building for years.

I questioned him over and over why he was in my office space.  All he could say was that he was checking things out.  Checking what out?  He couldn't tell me.  So all he said was that he was checking a lot of the other office spaces as well.  Checking for what?  He couldn't tell me.

I told him to leave and immediately called our building's Office Manager who did not answer her phone.  I called her assistant... no answer either.  So I decided to call the management company's security team.  I made my report to the person who answered and after checking a little, he called me back to say that the person does indeed work for the maintenance company hired by the building management.

After checking around my space, I could not find anything missing, but I still felt uneasy about finding someone in my private storage area without having had any advance notice from the building management.

I wrote an email message to our building manager reporting what happened and asked that the company look into the situation and to institute better security measures and procedures for maintenance people to let us know in advance when possible if someone is going to be in our office spaces.  While this person was indeed an employee hired by the building management, there was no way I would know this.  Am I to take anyone's word for it that they are in my space to check things out without my approval or knowledge?  How would I know if he wasn't in there just checking out what to steal later?  Or was he in there just to case the location to send someone else in there later to burglarize the space?

I received an email response about a half hour after my email complaint from the building manager stating the the employee will no longer have access to our building and that the building manager would contact me at the beginning of next week to discuss the situation.

Personally, I think I had walked in during a time period that the intruder did not think I would be there and I surprised him in the act of casing my location.  There's no reason for him to be in my private storage area.  Even if he was there to check the air conditioning , the thermostat is in the main classroom area.  There are no controls in the storage area.

I also keep my equipment case in the back room and place it in a specific location and angle every day before leaving the school.  It was moved slightly and not in the same position I normally leave it.  Why would maintenance need to move my equipment case?  Highly suspicious!

We'll see where all this leads.  Did they fire the employee or merely move him to another building?  We shall see.

(Image borrowed from the internet)

Tuesday, June 09, 2015

Swimming With Whales

You know, swimming with whales in the swimming pool of a cruise ship in Alaska might not be such a smart idea...


Still following him...