Humor: A Hard Day’s Night…

September 18, 2006 12:44 pm by Jarom Adair

MAKE MORE THAN YOUR BOSS
RealEstateInvestingForBeginners.com

Before finding my calling as a web guy, I worked in the position of security guard. I can’t say it was very interesting, but it’s one of the more relaxed jobs I’ve ever had because most of what you do involves #1: standing there looking alert so that anyone who plans on doing something bad sees you and decides not to make what he is doing obvious and #2: making the employees feel safe because they have somebody alert looking there to save them in case of emergencies.

Unfortunately I’m not much help in emergencies because I tend to throw even sensible people in a panic during times of disaster, but I make a great visual deterrent when I wasn’t falling asleep. I say falling asleep because I worked the graveyard shift. I really enjoyed this schedule because I worked at night, would sleep in the morning, and do whatever in the evenings. If I didn’t work a particular night, I could hang out with my friends and watch them struggle to stay awake at four in the morning.

The best part of this job was that, 11p.m. to 7a.m., there were virtually no people walking around in this high-rise I was supposed to be guarding so I could do whatever I wanted to do, namely writing letters and reading books. This was the first and only time in my life I was actually caught up on my letter writing because, really, the only people crazy enough to be working at that hour in the morning are the building’s janitors, the employees across the street at the 24-hour Taco Bell, and yours truly.

But anyways, I did discover that I was not so alone at night as I originally thought. I happened to be guarding a Wells Fargo Banking building and, up on the 5th floor, 24-hour customer service employees answered phone calls at all hours in the morning from irate customers who demand to know why their entire savings account was converted into Mexican pesos and dumped on their front porch.

These customer service employees are not a very happy bunch, as you might imagine, and I tried to avoid them whenever I made my rounds on their floor. I could hear them, in the wee hours of the morning, high above my head, screaming and cursing (and occasionally gnashing their teeth) into their headphones things like: “Well why did you lose your card in the first place??” and “How should I know what happened to your retirement fund?!?” and (by far the most common) “So MOVE TO MEXICO!!!”

I’m kidding of course. The 5th floor employees were very courteous and polite to their customers, even the irate ones. Then they’d take out their frustrations on the security guard when he did his rounds on their floor. But I really liked this job. It paid well, didn’t require mental exertion, and after the 6th or 7th time getting jumped by the customer service reps you really didn’t feel the pain anymore. The only problem with the “vampire” schedule is that occasionally sunlight struck my body and I burst in to flames. But you take the good with the bad, right?