Chapter 06

Supermarket Chronicles Volume 1,

Chapter 6: The Con Is On

Its one thing to be in a situation you don’t want to be in, but it is something completely different when that situation is well and truly under control. You see there was a number of things that I could have guaranteed, one of them is that the whole christmas bonus retrieval was always gonna come back and bite me. I know, I know, I’m starting this chapter in exactly the same place as I started the last one, but one of the other things I would have guaranteed would have been that I would one day tell this story like the legend that it is. You see the situation had progressed since I last wrote. We weren’t in the same meeting exactly. There was an extra member of staff in the room. Justin King.

“Mark-,” (he’s the store manager by the way) “Why are you still going on about this, let the guy go!” But before you can understand any more of the story and the reasoning behind my calmness in the given situation, you need to understand the people who played vital roles in the con that was this situation.

Vital role number one: Craig – a conversation mastermind with balls of steel
Number two: Aaron – a conversation mega-mind with computer brains faster than most
Number three: Ben – a clever maths dude who shows everyone else up on the deli counters
Number four: Justin King – the power-hungry monster, owner of all Sainsbury’s everywhere
Number five: Mitt – the newbie everyone uses to do their dirty work
Final vital role: Elisha – the perfect girl in a nightmare of employees and ‘winner of the kit-kat house’ (explained in the last chapter…)

So i think the best place to start is the thing that originally incriminated me. Cameras. No I had covered it, I made Mitt get the tape of my actions in the room that fateful day before christmas. You see I discovered a few things in that room, primarily that the computer that sat in the corner of the half canteen/half office room had an error message. This meant that the last person hadn’t logged off properly. And the last person was clearly the accounts manager, you see when I escaped from the error message all kinds of numbers and figures flicked through the pages. I didn’t get any of it but I knew two guys who would. Ben and Aaron. It wasn’t difficult to get them into the room, you see – being santa, it was only time before they came asking for christmas presents. And when they did I was able to use their incredibly smart brains to sort out the lack of christmas bonus.

Waiting for them to arrive gave me time. And this time was used productively. Mitt, not being the smartest of employees thought that my idea to hold ‘funny signs’ up against the security camera. His turn to do it was using a sign that read : “Mark, the store manager smells of poo poo and shouldn’t have had the sex change, love Mitt”. Why do that I hear you cry? Simple. Mitt never met the manager and on the whole didn’t do anything bad, so it worked as a warning sign that my time to die in the managers office was on its way. It worked a treat. You see I had managed to obtain the video tape all those months ago and hidden it. But at the risk of it being found, I wanted an alarm to sound for all to hear. It did.

Once in the office-o-doom I knew that I had to plead just one case; ‘I’ll get Justin on you…’ I wasn’t surprised when mark didn’t buy into my story. And what made it even more satisfying was that when the word on the shop floor that justin was on his way, it was hailed as yet another rumor. You see Craig had made a hobby of spreading the ‘love’ or news of Justin coming to town. Sadly for mark, he was on his way and here is why.

Mark had watched the first fantastic event on the tape. And now the second. But if he had watched a little bit further on the tape he would have seen my grand finale. I twisted the camera to fit the screen, I then made sure there was a clear view of what I was viewing. I was viewing emails. Sent from the computer. Send from Mark. To the evil of evils…. Tesco’s. It became clear that mark had joined forces with a tesco store locally to take over the town. Suddenly the tape got a whole new level of validity. Now I know what I did was almost stealing from the store. But it turns out the money would have only ended up eventually in marks pocket anyway. Having explained all this to Justin when he first visited the store earlier in the year, we had a lot of information to share and were keeping close eyes on certain people…. including mark.

Needless to say once justin had arrived, it was clear who’s side he was on. Mine. Done.

The meeting was nearly over, i had won, mark had lost and me and Justin were best mates. But as I stood up to leave, Justin told me to take a seat.
“This doesn’t resolve one thing, though, someone went though all of the kit kat wrappers to find the winning house. Its not secret that Elisha is living in that house now, so Stephen – its your job to keep a close eye on her. The second she slips up, you let me know and we can sort this out once and for all. And in case you had anything to do with the fake winning and would try and hide it – Mark is going to help you.”

I suddenly got the impression that Justin wasn’t as nice as he first seemed.

To be continued…

(its time to start picking sides…)