Stealing on the job

I’d just stepped off the airplane and was walking to baggage claim when I passed a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent guarding the exit. She was totally absorbed playing solitaire on her smartphone. She hardly noticed the crowd of people leaving the gate area. A grizzly bear could’ve entered through the exit and she’d have missed it. Her presence certainly did not make me feel safer. But that wasn’t what gripped me as I rode down the escalator. “She’s stealing from me.” I thought. “I’m a taxpayer. I pay her salary to guard a post so that the airport might be safer. She’s not doing her job, and I, the taxpayer, am being cheated.”

It’s easy to be critical of the TSA, but what about the rest of us? Do you have games on your work computer or smartphone? Do you play them while on the job? If you do, do you realize you are committing robbery? I know of no employer in the world, short of game developers, who pay people to play computer games. Good people, lazy people, and unthinking people seem to engage in this form of larceny quite frequently with little to no guilt.

But there are other ways to steal on the job: extending lunch hours, stretching breaks a few minutes each day, taking extra-long bathroom breaks, cleaning up early and resting until the 5 o’clock whistle. I’ve counseled people about these things, and they’ve responded, “My boss expects me to give extra hours and minutes here and there, so why shouldn’t I take a few extra minutes when I have the chance?” But Jesus said, “Go the extra mile.” He didn’t say, “Make sure things even out.” Ten minutes stolen six times a day is an hour a day. Multiplying that by 250 workdays a year amounts to felony theft.

There are other ways to steal that may be taken for granted. One Saturday afternoon, when my plant was idle, I discovered an employee, a solid Christian man, making 250 copies of a 10-page booklet he planned to use at his church. He’d not asked permission, nor had he bought his own paper. He assumed he could make unlimited copies. He was a thief. How many of us could count a substantial inventory of our employers’ pens, pencils, notepads, envelopes, and office supplies in our homes and never give it a second thought? If you owned the company, and every employee had your stock, what would that cost you?

It always seems easier to point to the other guy, to the TSA agent, or to the petty thief, but for a moment we should take Jesus’ advice and remove the plank from our own eye before we try to point out the speck in our brother’s. If we do, we may have to confess to being a common thief.