The harmless

I came to notice one particular genre of human race- they may go unnoticed but are sure to be found in our world irrespective of our race or creed.

In my college days, I had a handful of them as classmates. They are perfectly harmless sort who thrive in doing petty thievery. These guys can be trusted to make small changes suddenly out of nowhere. In return you see your mobile phones and calculators disappear suddenly. I once lost mine on the eve of examination. Upon a friend’s advice I approached one of these sly guys who offer to sell me a calculator at half the price. I buy it and soon realize that it was stolen from another classmate.

Well the thievery does not get limited to materials alone. They even try to short change ‘girlfriends’ to get a free meal or fuel. Very recently I saw one of the guys get married of and settled into a decent life.

I met such a guy in office very recently- Anthonykutty. He does petty things at office. He is not salaried and charges on contract. His main assignment is to keep clean the record room. The record room is a very important place for a bank where they keep all the documents. The record room will be peaceful at peaceful times. But when there is a sudden inspection or lawsuit, the age old documents have to be fished out.

Anthonykutty’s idea of keeping record rooms neat is to sell off all the documents. For that he convinces the chief manager that they are old and wasted. So when he disposes off the documents, he charges the bank for his labour. Then he sells off the old paper to recyclers. The story doing rounds is that he was once weighing the waste papers and he even put the passers by on the scale to increase the weights.

Now when inspection comes in, there are no records to be found. The bank staff gets a good hiding for that. When the inspector checks the record room, it’s spic and span because everything useful is sold out. Anthonykutty gets a pat.