Curiosity Didn’t Kill the Cat. Carelessness Did.
“IT support. Head Office sent me.“
Six words. That’s all it took.
It was an ordinary Tuesday. Nothing about the morning suggested anything was wrong.
At 8:47 a.m., a man walked up to the gate. He wore a company-branded polo, ID card clipped to his belt, a laptop bag over one shoulder. Confident. Unhurried. The kind of walk that says, “I have been here before” because why would anyone doubt that? He said the six words that open every door in every Nigerian office building:
“IT support. Head Office sent me.”
The gateman glanced at him. Glanced at the visitor’s book. And waved him through.
No one asked for his ID card number. No one called upstairs to confirm anyone was expecting him. No one asked him to sign the logbook or noticed that he never did. No one called the office manager to ask, “Please, do we have any IT people coming today?”
Why would they? He had the polo. He had the swagger. He looked like Head Office. And looking the part is, most days, all it takes.
Twenty minutes later, he was in the systems room, plugging a device into a port no one thought to question because the man holding it wasn’t questioned either.
An hour later, a supervisor’s laptop was missing from a desk.
By closing time, there was only one question moving from office to office, from the MD’s floor down to the gate:
How did this happen?
The answer disappointed everyone hoping for something dramatic. No hacking. No break-in. No drama at all. Just a man, a polo shirt, and a building full of people who each, quietly and reasonably, decided it wasn’t their place to ask.
We grew up hearing that curiosity kills the cat. It’s the warning our elders gave us against poking our nose where it doesn’t belong.
But maybe that saying has been pointing at the wrong culprit all along.
What actually costs an organisation its equipment, its data, its good name is not CURIOSITY. It is the absence of it. It is the quiet decision not to ask, because asking feels rude, or slow, or like you are accusing a visitor of wrongdoing when he’s probably fine. Won’t they think I am harassing them?
Carelessness doesn’t announce itself with sirens. It walks in wearing a polo shirt on an ordinary Tuesday, and everyone lets it pass because stopping it feels like more trouble than it’s worth.
Here’s what that Tuesday could have looked like instead.
The gateman looks up, and before waving him through, asks politely but firmly:
“Good morning, sir. Who exactly are you here to see? Let me call the office first.”
The gateman notes his name, phone number, and ID card details in the logbook and holds the gate until someone upstairs confirms.
A staff member passes him near the systems room and asks, without hostility:
“Good afternoon, please, who signed you in for this area?”
None of these questions require suspicion. None of them require confrontation or drama. They require one thing only: someone deciding that thirty seconds of “please confirm” is worth more than the discomfort of asking a stranger to prove himself.
That is the whole defence. Not a bigger gate. Not a fiercer guard. One person, in one moment, choosing to verify instead of assuming.
In security, curiosity isn’t rudeness; it is the job.
It is the instinct that notices the same unfamiliar car parked outside the gate for the third day running. It is the pause before transferring money because an “urgent” WhatsApp message from “the MD” arrived at an odd hour, asking you to keep it confidential. It is the second thought before holding the door for someone whose ID you never actually looked at. It is asking, every single time, instead of assuming.
Because the truth is uncomfortable: most incidents don’t begin with a mastermind. They begin with a dozen small, ordinary moments where someone almost asked and didn’t, because it felt easier not to.
The safest organisations are not the ones with the most cameras or the strongest gate. They are the ones where every gateman, every receptionist, every staff has made a habit of noticing, questioning, and confirming NOT because they suspect everyone, but because they respect what they have been trusted to protect.
Awareness is not paranoia. It is professionalism.
And sometimes, the smallest question is, “Please, who are you here to see?” is the only thing standing between an ordinary Tuesday and a very long, very expensive day.
