I just found a god-damned banana in the freezer. What the hell is that about? I guess it's some sort of science experiment and I'll remember why it's in there eventually.

Another of those bulletin mails just dropped in from the guys at ASIS - even though I haven't paid my dues in god-knows how many years - talking about the bank heist of the year so far in Pakistan, where a serving security guard turned up for work one day with a bunch of his pals and held the manager at gun-point until he opened the vault for them.

They got away with  9 million Pakistani rupees...okay, sure, it's only about USD107,000 but let me make my point. The 9 Mil sounds a whole lot better...

The world is still a real simple place - even though we see increasingly more complex problems all around us. Banks mostly annoy me. I see it all the time where they get all pernickerty about their fraud detection systems and their internal audit procedures, but because they are deep down just a bunch of ass-holes who we pay to hold on to our money so we don't go spending it on fast women and loose cars, their security procedures for the basic stuff are often horse manure. Especially when it comes to the developing and emerging market territories.

Don't be mistaken by the whole "emerging market" status crap. Even where there's the earliest stages of market emergence there's a bunch of Western oriented guys looking to carve up the foundations of future properity between themselves. They lord it up, driving around in their fancy cars and treating the serving classes like dirt so that they can feel like gigantic whales in tiny fish bowls. The only way they can get to do that is to oppress those serving classes by putting them on subsistance earnings and making them work in terrible conditions. You see it a lot. The security personnel they hire are just uneducated guys in uniforms (it's not the fault of the guy wearing the uniform that he's uneducated, by the way), so the procedures they're forced to follow have to be simplified to the educational level of the operative. So the procedures are useless and the guys who have to follow them get bitter and twisted because they're being treated like dirt while the guy in the Mercedes gets to eat lobster for breakfast.

Result - bitter and twisted security guy decides his only way out is to bring along his friends and put a gun on the manager's head until he opens the vault. USD109,000 split six ways is worth the risk.

So what am I saying here? Physical security, dude. Get your shit together at the core.