On this page:
1) Signs you've been in Security too long.
2) I used to be a Security Guard.
3) How to make registration of visitors easier for Security.
DISCLAIMER: This section features my repertoire of jokes, funny texts and funny stories (mostly) regarding the
profession I (used to) excert. Some of them are true, some of them are (slightly) exaggerated but they are all rooted in an
excisting situation. Any similarity to existing persons (alive or dead) or situations are of course not purely coincidental
but they are kept vague enough not to target anyone or any organisation in particular. However, should you think this page
is about you, just remember that one song by Carly Simon : "You're so vain".
15 Signs you have been in Security for too
long
1. You always ask your dates for their ID's, even though
you've been seeing them for 3 months...
2. You've stopped sleeping with a gun under your pillow...in
favour of a rocket launcher between the sheets.
3. You suspect a five year old with a pink "Pokemon"
squirt-gun to be part of a German freelance terrorist group.
4. Your codename has been changed from "Blue Fox" to
"Triggerhappy".
5. You actually start thinking you're wearing a cool
uniform.
6. You frisk your dates for fire-arms...(well...that's
my excuse anyway).
7. You say thinks like "Radio check, all clear"...even
when you're not holding a radio.
8. The house you live in has more booby-traps than all
three Indiana Jones movies combined.
9. Your idea of "a good day's work" includes the death
of at least three people.
10. You envy Tibetan monks, submitted to the vow of
silence, for their great social life.
11. You can situate all 53 emergency exits and 8000
fire-extinguishers in the building yet you can't remember where the main entrance is.
12. Your sole purpose for carrying a flashlight is to
make shadow puppets.
13. Your "Are you talking to me ?"-routine in front
of the mirror is scarier than De Niro's.
14. You've studied 12 different martial arts for 10.000
hours to become the best at what you do...video surveillance.
15. A psychiatric evaluation confirms you to be a raving
mental lunatic...which means you will get a promotion very soon.
* * *
I USED TO BE A SECURITY GUARD.
I used to be a security guard. I know security guards are often perceived as moronic
knuckle dragging Neanderthals and not in the good sense.
But I was not. I was part of a crack team. That does not
mean we were experts. We were all addicted to crack.
My team once saved some people from a burning building. The press
called us heroes and heroines. They were half-right.
I think I know why people in general dont like security guards.
This is because you are jealous. You are jealous because we get to wear the cool uniforms. And Michael Jackson is the ideal
babysitter.
A security guard's uniform always looks like its been designed by a colour-blind spastic five-year-old.
My uniform consisted of a lime green coloured shirt, shit brown pants and a necktie that looked as if it came from
a Hitler youth accessories surplus sale.
I caught a burglar once. Im using the verb "to catch" very loosely here.
What actually happened was: I saw him. He saw me. He saw my uniform. He collapsed laughing.
That little event changed
my life because I found out later he was in possession of a gun. He was "carrying a piece". He was "packing heat". Packing
heat for me meant lugging around a videotape of the movie with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
We were not armed. Management
figured that in case of a terrorist attack we would know what to do. And we did ! In case of a terrorist attack we would get
the heck out of there and let Bruce Willis handle things.
The closest thing to a weapon we had was a flashlight. The
ones we carried were about 30 centimetres long and 3 centimetres thick. They had the uncanny ability of giving male Security
Guards an immediate feeling of inadequacy and female guards a big grin.
But they were fairly useless a weapon. The
best option you had was to switch them on and pretend you were holding a lightsaber. Let me assure you most intruders are
not impressed by a flashlight and a security guard going "Fwooooooommmmm".
But they did give light. Boy, did they
give light ! If you switched them on everyone in a 5-kilometer radius would get out of bed thinking the sun had come up. If
you pointed them upwards they would interfere with weather satellites. Those white spots you see on weather maps aren't clouds.
That's a single security guard holding up a flashlight.
One of the main tasks of a security guard is to walk rounds.
Walking rounds at night mostly involves checking out dark and creepy corners you would not even get caught dead in during
the day. Mainly because you had indeed an actual chance of getting caught dead in them...
So you can imagine we were
all extremely ecstatic when were offered bulletproof vests. We were also ordered to wear another vest with the company logo
on it over them. It protected us from the rain and wind but unfortunately were the same vests used by the people who work
on airport runways. Meaning they were bright orange with reflective / fluorescent white strips. Great if you wanted to
go to a costume-party dressed as a Power Ranger. Not so great as we now were glow-in-the-dark targets for every potential
sniper in the Northern hemisphere.
A very obscure saying learns us: "If you do something, do it to the fullest". Apparently
this also applies to stupidity. Being bright balls of fluorescent light and thus an easy target for every possible assailant
during a round, we still had one thing going for us. We were silent. We were as silent as the "p" in "psychiatry". (Unless
you are of those people who insist in pronouncing it "Puh-sai-kai-atry" which will eventually get you the slap in the face
you darn well deserve, you illiterate freak of nature.)
't Was the night before Christmas and no sound could be heard...
except for the security guard using the £*$%^# new scanners they gave us. In order to have proof a round was actually
being walked, several chip-resembling recognition points are placed along the way. The security guard has to hold a scanner
against such a point to confirm he actually was there at a specified time. Simple task so it had to be changed.
The
old scanners made a faint noise to let the user know the chip-point was correctly read. This noise sounded a bit like a drop
of milk falling into a cup of coffee. Silent, non-threathening in short : smart. The new scanners produced a noise that
can only be described as Whitney Houston hitting the high note in that song from "The Bodyguard" being accompagnied by the
THX-trailer at top volume while standing next to Space Shuttle taking off... only much much louder.
Now you may think
that being weaponless, glow-in-the-dark and incredibly noisy, we would be so vulnerable we would not dare to go out into the
dark. Well, you are wrong. Of course we were vulnerable but there was one thing we could always depend on. No silly ! Not
our brains. But our radio.
The portable radio that would always keep us in contact with "heydjkjew". (Thats "Headquarters"
for those among you who are not very good in phonetics.) The two-way radio enabled us to have perfect contact with whomever
we where trying to reach provided they were standing within shouting range.
I am certain you know the kind of radio
I'm talking about. They can always be seen in Vietnam-films when the poor schmuck who is carrying the 3-ton behemoth on his
back gets shot along with the radio so the protagonists cannot call for back-up. This also illustrates the second rule of
survival in Vietnam-films : never ever carry the radio. (The first rule of course being : never ever ever ever show a picture
of your fiancée, wife or relatives.)
Come to think of it, the reason why the radios we used were slightly worse than
two cans tied together with a string may well have been caused by the Vietcong-bullets we regularly still found logded into
them.
Fortunately we were lucky to have the one thing a security guard cannot miss to get through his shift. No...
not his brain. We went over this already, stupid ! I am talking about the coffee machine.
This thing was huge and
ancient. It must have been constructed by a long forgotten civilization around the time Atlantis got wiped off the map. Each
time it started a cycle to produce a coffee, it would shake at a tremendous speed. Parts of it were swapping place and were
either sucked in or new parts emerged, leaving us with a completely differently shaped machine after each cup. It appeared
to be a marketing ploy gone badly, as I cannot remember ever having seen a Coffeebot in the Transformers cartoon.
And
although it had buttons, allowing the choice to have your coffee black or with added cream and sugar it only served this one
deep dark sludge. The kind dinosaurs drowned in. We send a cup of this "coffee" off to a laboratory to determine once
and for all what exactly the sludge was made out of. They never answered us. I can only assume the contenance of the cup escaped,
killed all the scientists and is now in a furious battle with a deep covert group of military experts trying to keep it from
taking over the world.
Lets hope they are not a crack team.
***
How to make to registration of visitors easier for Security.
Have as many meetings as possible starting at the exact
same time. It is perfectly feasable for two or three security guards to register, without any delay, 400+ visitors who all
show up at the same time.
Make sure to switch meetings rooms without notification.
Dumb luck is a security guard’s sixth sense so using a ouaji-board, Dungeons & Dragons dice and some voodoo chicken
bones will reveal which of the 40+ meeting rooms the visitor has to be in.
Do not announce the meeting at all. Security guards are
the most trusting people in the world and we never get nervous when surprise guests pop out of the woodwork without any form
of clearance.
When sending a participants list for clearance purposes,
make sure the list is as inacurate as possible. You can do this by :
- blatantly providing the wrong names.. or wrong list.
- being a little more sneaky by misspelling every other
name.
- sneaking in a dead guy or two for good measure. It’s
always fun to remind visitors of their deceased colleagues.
- being vague : "John whatshisname and that fat guy with
the glasses will come and he’ll bring some other guy… or maybe three or four."
Use as many, preferably unknown and unrelated acronyms
for the meeting. Change them after every meeting. Ex: Accountance Meeting, Acronym : XK, LDS, PITG, C3PO or Project Cootywootybooty.
Invite as many participants possible who do not speak a
single word of any of the "world" languages. Everyone in Security is fluent in obscure Kenyan dialects, first dynasty Egyptian
and early 1970’s Vietcong codes.
Invite at least two or three participants who will act
like supreme prima donnas or will feel their basic human rights have been violated when they have to identify themselves.
We do not consider our day to be complete unless at least three people call us Nazi fascists.
Invite as many participants as possible who are so clueless
they make your teeth itch. After all, we do have free access to the data of the police, the Army, FBI, CIA, MI5 and UNCLE
combined. So we will have no trouble figuring out exactly why these yoghurt brains are drooling in front of us.
* * *
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