Making You Feel More Secure

SO WHAT DO YOU DO? I KILL TIME...

I watch the carousel rolling by
As I sit here inert in my clip-on tie;
Would I rather be part of their mechanical herds
Or waiting and watching and doing crosswords?
Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll find a job that is hard,
But today I'm content as a security guard.

an original poem by yours truly, April 1993.

In 1992 and '93, I was a security guard working overnight shifts in several different office buildings in downtown Boston. If you have an office, or maybe even just a desk, in a building that's "protected" by overnight security guards, your desk has been thoroughly searched for food, booze, and porn. Just thought you should know.

The overnight shift, depending on the building, was usually two guards. Every two hours, one guard would tour the building. We carried around a heavy, leather-bound clock; there were 18 keys located throughout the building. Each key, when inserted into the clock and turned, would make a mark on an ever-advancing roll of paper. The next morning, the supervisor would remove the paper and make sure that the tours were done at the specified times and all locations were marked. It was a thirty- to forty-five-minute tour, every two hours, and the two guards alternated tours. That left a lot of free time all night in a quiet, empty building.

When I started dating the future Mrs. Rodius, we spent night after night talking for hours on the phone while I was at work. She had to get up in the morning to go to school and to work, while I could go home from work in the morning and sleep all day. I don't know how she kept going, but as I believe I've mentioned, she's the world's most capable woman.

But the rest of the time, there were vast stretches of empty night to fill. That's when I started smoking regularly, because if I went outside for a cigarette break every hour on the hour, it broke up the time into manageable chunks. But there was still too much of it, so the other guards and I did what any normal people would do in that situation: we rifled through other people's stuff. I'm not proud of it now, but it was just a part of the culture then. So believe it. Your desk has been searched, and its relative value as a source of ill-gotten booty has been calculated and reported to all the other guards that might work other shifts. If your office has booze with which it schmoozes clients, it's been hit repeatedly, and it's been watered down repeatedly, too, to disguise the lost volume. It's a fact.

One of my buildings had a barber shop on the second floor. What could be better? It had candy. It had a years-deep backlog of Playboy magazines. It had TV's. It had perfect, reclining chairs for sleeping.

The only security guard that I ever knew to get fired was Phil. Phil got fired because he didn't write an incident report. The battery on a floor scrubber exploded, within feet of Phil's desk and within sight of a security camera, injuring two of the janitorial staff. The supervisor was incredulous. Phil didn't think it qualified as an "incident." Phil was wrong.

That company also had a contract with the New England Patriots. I was offered a position on the detail that protected the cheerleaders at each home game. About the only thing you really could do to get kicked off that detail was hit on one of the cheerleaders, but even so, the turnover rate was surprisingly high. It wasn't a complicated job. Mostly we stood around outside the practice bubble waiting while the cheerleaders were inside doing whatever it is that cheerleaders do before a game. Then we would walk to the stadium while the cheerleaders were driven over in vans. During the game, we stood on the field facing the fans and did two things and two things only: catch anything that was thrown at the cheerleaders, and be able to say with certainty which fan threw it. I never, in half a season of home games, had to actually do either one.

But what I did do was stand around in a yellow windbreaker and watch people get drunk. My favorite conversation with one of those drunk fans, back when Dick MacPherson was coach and being a Patriots fan did not mean quite what it does today, went something like this:

"So what are you gonna do?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You gonna, like, tackle me if I run out on the field? I bet I could out-run you."

"No, sir, I won't tackle you."

"Oh. I didn't think so. You don't look that fast. So what good are you?"

"I call over that state trooper and that state trooper, and they tackle you. Then they escort you out of the stadium. Then they charge you with felony trespass."

"Oh... Well, I didn't mean I was going to do it. I was just curious what you'd do."

"I understand, sir."

And thus, the world was made safe for one more day.