Monday, March 9, 2009

Strange things going on at BGA, I wonder why?

I have put in a lot of time working for BGA and during that time I only seen the police twice, once when a couple of aposing gang members were hired in the warehouse and they tried to (not very hard) to kill each other in the parking lot. Pretty dull entertainment for a Monday, the second instance was when one of the warehouse employees killed his girlfriend and went to work as if nothing had happened, I wont even say it was close to entertaining, it was how ever a very sad day even though the management carried on as if nothing happened. Aparently when the management tells the people in the warehouse not to think they actually take it to heart and as soon as they make it past their three month probation period they turn thier brians off. My guess is its the only way they cope. Some obviously dont. A sad day for Bermuda.BGA has had several occasions when things have been stolen from various areas of the company but in almost every case the Police were never called, nor was there any attempt to try and make sure it never happened again. In fact the company seems to go out of its way to make sure their is no security. Case in point, the security codes for BGA main warehouse consist of a fixed digit code, those codes are maintained by a company called Bermuda Security Group who for a fee that BGA never wants to pay will assign a new code to a new employee as they are hired. Because management never wanted to pay the fee when a new employee was hired they also never wanted to deactivate a code when an employee left the company. So they decided to recycle the codes even if it meant that the person using that code might have been fired, the next person to take his or her position would probably get the same code. To this day there have been a lot of people with access to the security codes that have left the employment of BGA but the codes never change they continue to be used. Also because there have been a non-stop revolving door in certain positions within the company, some of the codes have been used by more then one person, in fact several people. If the company was ever broken into and the warehouse robbed, there is no way you could identify who did it based on who had access to the security codes because over the years half the population of Bermuda knows those codes. Last year around the beginning of 2007 a project to purchase and install new surveillance equipment for the warehouse was started. By January 2008 everything was installed and was up and running. As I understand it the equipment was purchase to watch the entrances and exits of the warehouse and not the people working there.That month the whole thing was shelved, the equipment was dismantled and the camera's taken down.It almost like the management of BGA doesn't want anything watched to closely, the management knows there is stealing going on but they obviously don't want anybody to identify who's doing it. If the employee's wanted to prove it isn't them management removed the only thing that would prove it.Its very confusing, I don't understand it, why would you OK the expense of purchasing equipment only to take it down just before you start to use it. It doesn't make sense.Why did they OK it in the first place.The original plan was to purchase camera's to watch the warehouse shipping doors. A few additional camera's were later installed to watch the receiving area doors. The intention was not to watch the warehouse personal but to watch for what was leaving the warehouse. This could have been anything from merchandise to office equipment. The camera's were placed to watch people coming into the warehouse and record what they left with. But once everything was in place the CEO of BGA then decided he didn't want the equipment, why is a complete unknown. I do know that he tried to deflect the approval of the purchase and the installation of the equipment and that after a year of progress he denied he had OK'ed the project and that the individual charged with the project was working on his own. Unfortunately for the CEO there were to many people involved in the process and a paper trail that was signed by him and authorized by him lead straight back to him.Something strange is going on at BGA their security systems are so bad that every time it rains the alarm company usually disregard the alarms. They still call to get the OK but if that verification process takes all night the security company will never call the Police or Fire Department. The place could burn down in a real fire and if nobody told the security what to dothey would never call, for that matter even if they did call and the fire alarms were going off its more than likely the security company would be told to ignore it. There have been so many false alarms at the warehouse that you might as well not have an alarm system.What I would like to know is, what insurance company covers this company and why? I keep waiting for the place to burn down, I'm betting the fire department wouldn't show up to put out a real fire unless the flames threaten the neighborhood. And from what I have been told its more than likely the fire department would show up with hotdogs and marchmellow's and watch the place burn.Possible reasonIn 2004, 2005 a partial survey of what worked and what didn't was done in the warehouse, out of that the Fire department recommended that BGA update some of the fire equipment.Alarm bells, alarms sensors and other things like a formal escape plan and a time scale to do it in which was recommended to be done before a disaster happened. None of these things were ever done because of two reasons. Number one, the expense was very high. although the price of the equipment was low the installation was high, no electrician would touch the existing electrical wiring in the building and insisted on new wiring as part of the quote. Second, and everything comes back to this point BGA does not own the building and therefore will not make improvements to something they don't own, even at the safety of it's own customers and employee's.There is a third factor which I would also like to mention and that is the BGA warehouse itself pre-dates all present construction, structural and electrical requirement codes. Any improvements made to the property would fall under the new building codes and would force the owner to upgrade the entire building. Which means the government cant force Marketplace to improve conditions in the warehouse even if those improvements could be life threatening if they are not done. This could be why the management of BGA stop the surveillance project, a better guess would be that camera's watching the doors would record the coming and going of the rat and bird population and stolen items but management also decided that that would be a very bad idea to have a recording of the building falling on somebody or the building burning down if it also proved negligence on the part of Marketplace and BGA. Think about it BGA employee's, the building your working in is only standing because of one factor, LUCK. Some day that building will collapse from metal fatigue, from rust, from the extra weight put on the roof by building a second one on top of it. I hope BGA's luck holds up and nobody is under it when it happens.If anybody knows the insurance company's name, send me an email. I want to make sure I'm covered by somebody else, anybody else.

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