As a young company, we are striving to make ourselves more professional. If we are to build any real scale, we will have to improve our disciplines and structures. But… never at the expense of character and soul. Which is why, despite the plain wrongness of what happened last week, I can’t help but laugh and celebrate that harmless shenanigans can be accepted at mag nation.
One of our employees, who will remain nameless, was last week rummaging around in our storeroom , and found a spare “dome camera” used to monitor our stores against theft. In his childish wisdom, he got a ladder and some Velcro, and stuck the camera high up on the wall of our staff toilet. It was high enough that not everyone would see it straight away.
The camera was not connected to anything. There are no wires running to the toilet. However, all hell broke loose. Some of the girls discussed suing us. Our team was appalled. Our other MD was even convinced to play along, saying that it was the only way to curb employee theft!!! And the staff believed him.
When the responsible staff member came clean and told everyone that the camera was non-functional, there were laughs all round. It frankly was damn funny. Even after we all knew it was a prank, it was still hard to do our business with a camera staring down at you. I asked him to remove the camera yesterday. Too many issues of stage fright!
I am sure that some corporate lawyer type will tell me that the prank was simply not on. I agree that it wasn’t very smart, but it did make us all laugh. I like that mag nation allows us to laugh. We want to be a serious business. But it’s nice to laugh too.
