Hello people,
Here are the questions:
Been applying to jobs? Yep.
Any response? Nope.
Still blogging? When I can.
“You did a good job.” Thats what they told me just a few weeks ago, but things change.
A few weeks after the stellar showing at my security job things have gone in just about the opposite direction. It happened because of this shift this weekend. The first thing to go bad was a phone call I got from the boss just as I was getting ready to take off. I go where the boss sends me and this week I was told to make my way to a new joint.
They were understaffed I was told and he told me to get there as fast as I could. It’d be me on the door and another guard roaming around inside.
New places mean new people. Which mean new impressions. I’ve never been good at first impressions, heck I’ve never been much good at any impressions. My family can attest to that.
I figure they needed one look at me to make up their minds up about the kind of person I was. So the other guard greeted me with something close to annoyance. He told me to stay on the door.
There was a function happening. I was supposed to just stand there and not bother anyone. I did so. The other guard joined the staff behind the bar, I am pretty sure they spent most of the night joking and snickering about me. This was not a spectacular way to start a shift, but I did not have to worry about that, the night had bigger things for me to worry about.
Trouble can be the kind of thing thats unexpected or something you see every inch of of its advance towards you. With security it is always a mixture of both. I have a tendency to be cagey, usually because I feel the pressence of some impending chaos. It hangs over you like an anvil suspended by a narrow string. I see evil in every face that comes by, if not I at least see its potential.
The bad start to the night, and the fact that all the people were walking around me like I did not exist were getting to me. But it was fortunate that besides the function the place was just about empty.
It was too cold and quiet for your average joe looking for a good time. The most any of them would do was step into the place for a little while and quickly move on.
A good portion of the night went like this with me just standing dumbly on the street, looking scared and cold to everyone who walked by on the nearly empty street. The funtion finished up, whihc meant that the bigger part of the venue opened up to the public. a bunch of the attendees stuck around and were ready to party, but even with this it was still pretty quiet.
it would have been good if things could have finished up quiet, I had time to think. I was building up a resentment to all the suckers inside. I was having fun alone and in the cold.
But even though the cold lasted, the quiet didn’t.
The problem was the place I was working was a late night kind of place, so even on a quiet street in a quiet part of the city, when other places start closing early even the quiet streets get filled up with all kinds of people looking for warmth.
I was in a bad mood, so I was ready to send everyone away. Tell them their night was done and to look for comfort at home, with their families. But I’m only supposed to do that with peple who are already too intoxicated to be anything other then a risk to anybody, especially themselves.
So I let some people in. I sent others away, never without an argument of course, but that’s to be expected. It is a hard job trying to give a drunk person a reson why they can’t do something. The spirits power you and motivate you.
But trouble didn’t come from some I had tried redirecting home, that would have been something I’d be ready for. Trouble came from someone who had gotten through the cracks and weaseled their way inside. Someone who had been only slightly wasted, but had festered in the place behind my back.
Most people in bars and clubs drink. And as far as drinking goes it doesn’t take much to bend someone and make em weird, so if I am looking for danger in a drunk person it is usually physical stuff that I’m looking for. How people stand, how they walk, sit, lean, whatever, and especially any signs of violence.
The problem is these things only work so far. You get an idea of the kind of control a persons brain have over their body, but it don’t let you know where abouts their mind is wandering. What are they thinking?
You need to be real good to know if someone is having the good time they were hoping for, or boiling away and looking for any excuse to kick off like some kind of drunk, soggy explosive.
I’m not a good enough guard to know if that was the case this weekend, I’m not even good enough to know what happened at all.
Maybe it was a sudden thing, a clash between meatheads who realised that they weren’t about to back down to some douchebagin front of them.
Like I said, Ie was at the front door. I didn’t know anything at all was happening inside until I heard the electronic hiss of the walkie talkie on my hip.
“Back up, back up.” The guard kept repeating.
I told him I was heading over. He told me to get to the toilets.
When I got there the other guard was pullic a gigantic middle aged man out of the mens toilets and into the corridor. I moved in to help and grabbed the mans elbows and pulled him away from the door. Being this close I quickly notived someting, the man was furious and thrashing about. He spotted me with his animal eyes. I don’t know what he saw, but I could feel him shifting his arms to try and hit me. Lucky I was either strong enough, or he was spent enough that all he could manage was a little wiggling.
I told him to calm down, tried to find out what the frick had just happened. As soon as he calmed down a little the other guard started pestering him out of the bar.
The man stopped flailing and started moving along, the other guard told me to keep an eye on the men in the toilet to make sure that the fight didn’t start again.
As the giant man walked towards the entrance a younger lady handed him a wooden cane.
Inside the toilet there were four younger men in suits, all of them were in a state, but there was one in particular that caught my attention. The man was pale and had a wound in his head that was pouring blood. He was trying to slow it down with a fist full of toilet paper.
There was also glass and blood all over the floor tiles. The man with the head wound lookied like he was trying to say something to his friends, but it was pretty clear that his clock had been rocked and he was not making much, if any sense.
“What happened?” I asked one of the other men.
“That guy just went berserk.” he said.
The man said the big fellow had gone into the toilet, started swearing at the four men and in some kind of drunken fury had attacked them.
“He was hitting us with his cane.” he told me.
Luckily the man with the head wound turned out okay, it was not as bad as all the blood suggested and after a while he started making sense.
As he was leaving I told him he should probably go to a hospital he didn’t seem to want to.
Maybe it is my weakness as a guard to not assume that a man that goes into a bar with a walking stick is not going to use the earliest opportunity to beat people about with it. People have glasses, I don’t think they are just going to use them to slice each others throats. I don’t know what words were exchanged, I just know that somehow I messed up.
Maybe if I was in a better mood. Maybe more attentitive and this would not have happened. Maybe if I even sort of knew how to read a crowd.
Thanks for reading and good luck with everything.
I am a stranger 
