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Sep-11-2004 20:21

So, now that the clerks are in town, deligintly keeping track of all you agency members, I need to move onto actually providing your communal equipment with a little more security.

While I agree that allowing some way of designating some equipment as belonging an agency and adding additional restrictions on those items would be the ideal solution, I don't think I could put in place a workable system like that in less than 4 weeks or so. So, I'm going to consider that as a feature that will be good to add in the future, but probably not right away.

Here's what I propse doing as sort of a temporary measure. I could add a checkbox when checking in equipment that allows you to designate it as "Private". Private equipment could only be checke out by you, or by a director. Alternately, I could make it so that either Officers or Directors could remove a "Private" item that somebody else checked in.

What do you think?

1) Is it a decent idea?

2) Who, besides the person who checked in a private item, should be able to remove it? Officers and up, or just Directors?

Sep-11-2004 23:24

I would be ok with this. The only hitch it would provide for our agency is that every agent in our agency uses forensic cameras, fur hats and lab coats to search their crime scenes. So people in our agency who aren't officers or higher would not have access to these items, unless there is a way to leave them as public.

We could live with it though, I think.

Sep-12-2004 12:27

I like the idea of doing something to avoid theft from agency lockers, but I'm just wondering how this marking items as private would work?

By "checked out" do you mean "sold" or only "used" by directors/officers?

Sep-12-2004 13:27

You would have the option of marking an item as either public or private when you leave it in the locker. If somebody else removes it and puts it back in, they can then change that setting when they store the item. By checking out, I mean removing. Once again, once you've removed an item, you would be able to do whatever you want with it.

Sep-12-2004 14:00

Okay, that's what my first assumption was as well :)

However, I'm wondering if the effect of this won't just be that everyone will have to become at least officers to use the equipment?

What I mean is, as Orbitrux mentioned, most detectives (from agents and up) use most of the equipment already, and to secure equipment, items would have to be marked as private thus allowing only directors and possibly officers to use it - agents no longer could.
Then if marked as public, everyone would have the ability to use it, but also the option to suddenly store valuable items as private and potentially selling and/or leaving with them.

Of course by marking items as private like this agencies could then secure 1 max up set of equipment for each skill and leave the rest of the locker open for agents to use - that's would be for each agency to decide on its own of course.

Sep-12-2004 14:08

Ahh, think I might not have thought this through completely before writing (very noisy movie on in the background :D )

- correction of what I wrote above is of course that: if an agent should suddenly start storing items as private, directos and officers could then just store them as public again :p

However, I'm still unsure about the sharing and securing aspect in terms of possibly leaving agents in some sort of limbo??

Sep-14-2004 02:04

maybe its better if private items can be worn by everyone but not sold or logged of with? is that possible or too difficult to program?

as said before things like camera,lab coat and fur hat are used by all but thats exactly the things that get stolen. is there a way to let everyone use it but still protect it from being sold or logged of with?

Sep-14-2004 08:15

I think that if the directors feel the need for these systems, it sounds fine as long as they remain 'optional'. My agency hasn't opted for the Clerk system and I'd like it to remain that way.

Sep-14-2004 14:43

I think that it's a wonderful idea that would definitely make us feel a lot safer about who we hire and what they can walk away with.

Sep-14-2004 15:19

It seems that the idea of marking items as private detracts some from the team spirit created by joining an agency. Plus, why should a director or officer be able to remove items placed in the locker by a rookie or agent? From a logistics standpoint it may sometimes be necessary, but it hardly seems like a symbiotic system.

I thought the idea of promoting a rookie was to reward the detective's hard work and make them a part of the team. The promotion doesn't seem like much if they're still treated like they're on probation.

Personally, I think the option of marking items as private should be optional. Also, if it's instituted, a detective should only be allowed to mark ONE item as private. Otherwise, there will be a log jam of items in the lockers and what's the fun if there isn't a little bit of chance involved?

I mentioned this before, but I still think a simple solution (although it may not be simple from Ben's perspective) is to make it impossible for detectives to resign from an agency with items more valuable than they could have earned on their own based on their experience level. I think this would solve most of the theft problems.

Sep-14-2004 22:27

The problem with making it so that they can't resign with something more valueable than they would have earned is that it leaves the possibility of having an agency full of people with the ability to do ridiculously hard cases and incredibly hard favors. Then one or 2 people quit wearing items won on lower level favors (lab coats, seal skin coats, etc) and it becomes very hard to replace them.