Week 6 - Late Night Lock In |
I opened the door. Sure enough it was. Since the robbery I guess they thought they would be more vigilant. Well it wasn’t an unreasonable suggestion, given the hour that I should pack up and go home. I asked him to give me 10 minutes.
Two minutes later, another knock. Another Police Officer. Well how was I going to finish if they kept interrupting me? This time there were 5 of them – safety in numbers? So they stood behind me, somewhat bewildered by the technology that furnishes the ZIFF office, a computer here, a stapler there, and a fax machine that played a dial tone when you hit the big button. "What do you think you’re doing?" I yelled and suggested they waited outside. Not entirely compliant I made a thing of shutting down every PC, and closing the shutters on every window. Eventually, my uploading was complete and I was ready to leave.
Then things started to get worse. Someone had earlier snapped shut the padlock that we use to close the office. Since that morning the locks had been changed and my key was no longer useful. It was now 1:10am. Nothing for it, I would have to ring around the key holders. Still with 5 policemen watching I found my mobile in the bottom of my bag. An impressive device that was clearly more interesting than any other handset on the island. Then I extracted my local SIM from my wallet and swapped it with the one in the phone… even more intriguing – a man with two SIMs. The first key holder’s phone was switched off, very sensible given the hour. The second rang for a very long time before I gave up. The third was answered after a while by a sleepy Yvonne (the Executive Director), however there was no avoiding her key-holding responsibility and she agreed to give her key to her watchman who would bring it around to the office. The Policemen seemed satisfied that the office would be vacated and locked eventually, explained that they had to go on their rounds and couldn’t possibly wait any longer. It was 1:40am by the time I finally got to bed.
Week 6 - Late Night Lock In |