Mystery of missing underwear

By Maloba Andati

The manager of a garment manufacturing company in Nakuru recently made an amazing discovery.

His workers had hatched a plot whereby they reported to work without underwear. They would then steal and put on underwear that the company manufactures.

For a long time, supervisors at the well-known company had been complaining of the mysterious disappearance of textiles and underpants for both males and females.

The management decided to start inspecting the employees as they left work in the evening. Before departure, every employee would be frisked by the guards at all the exit points to make sure no one left with anything from the factory.

Polythene bags

This paid off and the pilfering went down slightly. The managers decided to become even sterner, ensuring that employees were frisked both on arrival and departure. All workers were ordered to desist from entering the factory with any bag, including polythene bags. The success of this measure was however minimal as the theft only went down slightly.

Strangely, even as the theft of other garments went down, that of undergarments only seemed to increase. The management was in a quandary. As they held a brainstorming session to discuss alternative measures, one supervisor came up with what sounded like a crazy idea: that all workers be forced to strip naked.

Strip naked

This seemed impractical, with some managers citing the Sexual Offences Act. They said that forcing employees to strip was tantamount to sexual harassment. They, however, agreed to monitor the situation further before doing so.

And so it came to pass that after a few weeks of dilly-dallying, the employees got a rude shock when one Friday evening, they were asked to leave work early to facilitate maintenance of the machinery. They were also required to undergo a thorough search as they left the premises.

They did not believe it when they were asked to strip naked. And to show the company’s seriousness, there were two policemen for males and two policewomen for the female workers.

And the managers’ worst fears were confirmed when it turned out that close to 90 per cent of the briefs worn by workers had been stolen that very day.

It was established that the workers had, after the initial frisking was introduced, come up with a clever ploy of going to work without their undergarments.

On questioning, they confessed to wearing many undergarments so that they could sell them to unsuspecting clients in the estates. Two male employees were caught wearing women’s panties. A supervisor who spoke on a condition of anonymity informed us that the company had been losing an average of 500 undergarments every month. Disciplinary action was taken on the ‘guilty’ ones, but the management was doing everything to ensure the story doesn’t attract media attention. A few workers Crazy Monday spoke to corroborated the story, with some saying they wouldn’t want to expose themselves to the media given the embarrassment.

One would wonder why a grown man or woman would choose to walk around ‘naked’ in order to steal undergarments.