still more things I hate that other people do

I was really disturbed by a conversation that I overheard at work today.

Maybe I'm naive, but I choose to believe that people that I work with are trustworthy and respectable, and hold similar values and standards to mine. Today, in no uncertain terms, I learnt otherwise.

As I tried to focus on my work this afternoon, I was distracted by a conversation between several colleagues taking place behind a partition next to me.

A senior colleague, whom I already had scant respect for anyway, was explaining to members of his team, in detail, how he cheats the public transport system.

He buys a zone 1 yearly travelcard, at a discount cost through our organisation, then uses it to travel to and from a zone 2 station. He achieves this by disembarking from inbound trains at an unstaffed inner suburban station to validate his card in the morning, or by lying to gate attendants at Parliament station if he's unable to validate in time. On the return trip, he can just walk through the gates at his station, which is generally unstaffed. Doing so saves him, and defrauds the public transport system, of hundreds of dollars a year.

One of his junior colleagues, an American who just moved to Melbourne to live and work this year, then bragged that he had been caught 3 times by inspectors on trams without a valid ticket, but had managed to avoid being fined by making up various lies. He doesn't 'see' why he should have to pay for a ticket, when the system offers him such a good chance of getting away without paying!

Cheating. Lying. Bragging about it in public.

I was stunned by the blatant and arrogant dishonesty of these people. Here are a few more pertinent facts...

• the Department of Transport, whom they are both defrauding, is a major client of our organisation;
• as taxpayers, all of us are forced to subsidise the cost of fare evasion;
• both of these people work in our organisation's purchasing branch, and are trusted to handle purchasing and payment arrangements;
• it's fairly well established that people who are prepared to cheat and commit petty larceny in one environment are going to be inclined to do so when other opportunities arise as well.

I've completely lost my faith in these people, and won't trust either of them again. I still need to determine if my outrage is based too much on personal beliefs, or whether there's cause to make a formal complaint about the issue to management.