Dropbox Drugs.

This week's prompt: - Write about your Job from a different Perspective.

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My name is Tomas, and I am a drug dealer. There, I’ve admitted it. I’m not the person you see on street corners selling small bags for a few bucks. Instead, I operate a well-established network, selling to hundreds each week. Right now, I'm sitting in a police cell, awaiting charges. 

While I have a moment, I will tell you how I got caught. It wasn’t a tip-off, a rival, or the police doing their job; no, it was me, myself, getting too cocky.  

Before I explain further, let me share how my network expanded from just two customers to a list of 500 names and addresses. I used an online selling app, which was later copied by the pre-owned clothing store Vinted. 

My legitimate business, at least on paper and for tax purposes, was selling pre‑owned T‑shirts. They came in four colours and four sizes. The colours dictated the drug you wanted; the size determined the quantity. A white T‑shirt in large meant three bags of heroin. A small red got you one bag of cocaine. Blue, medium, was two bags of fentanyl. Black, extra‑large meant a mixture of all three. If the customer wanted four bags of Cocaine, they would pick Red - XL size and so on. 

The delivery side got easier with time and technology. In the beginning, I was posting those packages out at a local Post Office until the owner, Patak, got a bit suspicious. Then, with the invention of the ‘Dropbox’, my life was easier. The customer picked and paid on-line I bagged off the order, printed the address label with QR code, took it to Morrisons, where my nearest ‘Drop Box’ was situated and dropped it off. In two days, the order was delivered, and the money was deposited into my account. Happy Days.   

At one time, I regarded the system as ingenious, perhaps even sophisticated. I persuaded myself that its ordinary appearance meant it went unnoticed. My parcels blended seamlessly with countless others travelling through a network built for millions of transactions, lost as they shuffled among thousands. I wrongly equated sheer volume with security. 

No one knew my name, and they didn't have to. To them, I was simply TT65. After logging in, they selected a "Shirt," paid, and received their order in three days. 

One afternoon, bored in a flat that wasn’t really mine, the radio was on a phone-in show. I wasn’t listening; it was humming away in the background. A caller mentioned something small, almost a joke, about strange online listings, odd patterns, and colours meaning more than colours.   

The presenter laughed, but then he did what he always does: he asked questions. Not accusations. Just curiosity. 

That was enough. 

I didn’t hear the click when the net tightened. I only noticed the silence when orders stopped coming in. No messages. No payments. Just a stillness. A few days later, there was a knock on the door, calm and polite. The boys in blue, they already knew everything. The list. The patterns. They had CCTV footage, the lot.

At present, I find myself seated on a plastic bench beneath unyielding fluorescent lighting, reflecting on what I had done. Because in my head, I was like McDonald's, selling the fastfood to fat people. Shops selling scratch cards to people with a gambling habit. Pubs selling beer and spirits to alcoholics. New pop-up shops selling vapes, these things kill people every day, and they never get arrested. Is it not up to the individual person who buy's these things on how they take them? Anyway, I'm here now..., So.

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I don’t know what comes next. The charges, the court case, the headlines, my face in the paper and all over social media. What I do know is this: the network is gone, the cleverness exposed as arrogance, the people who used my network sensibly, now buying from some scally on a street corner, where it could be mixed with rat poison, talc, fertiliser, who knows. And all this ended because the voice on the radio was asking simple questions. I think that the most dangerous thing I ever did wasn’t selling drugs. 

It was, I believed, that no one was really paying attention.