The Smurfs go on holiday

Yes,, the  Smurfs at the University are taking a brief hiatus  until July. Thanks  for reading!

The costs of free internet

Here in the library, the university provides free internet for anyone to come and use it. The idea was actually not for anyone actually. It was for the students and professors. The rest of us staff and employees have work to do. But no one told the homeless and jobless this. So they think it is just for them.
Its weird to watch them show up in the mornings- when I am here on early shift- and queue for access to the reference rooms and other public PC areas. The students tolerate their intrusion with thin masks of shock, fear and disgust. They can afford to since there are labs just for them to use- you have to have a student I.D. to get into those areas. An additional plus is that those ares are- in fact- far away from reference.
The reference people try to act like it doesn't matter who uses the computers to surf the net- but because they have painted themselves into a corner with it, they are stuck.
So what is the problem with 20 to 30 homeless/unemployed and might as well be homeless people using these computers?
In a word.
Porn.
The homeless have discovered what the rest of us geeks have known for years. The best thing about the internet is free or almost free porn. (Only idiots pay for it). If someone know where or how to look, one can find tons and tons of free porn on the internet. The Homeless know this and are only to eager to share their knowledge. This group of homeless/jobless are almost to a man, men 20 to 30 something, mostly white, thin to moderately overweight and mostly white. They are largely unwashed and smell about 1 to 2 shades better than Cesspool.

Reference decided in their infinite wisdom (about a coke can full anyway) that their internet would not be censored or restricted just in case of a professor or student who needed to research some area that would trip across pornography.So the Homeless have a free ticket to endless porn surfing in the reference rooms during business hours.

Got to love a bunch of librarians protecting freedom of speech and their own access to porn.

Hiding Out

There are times when a Smurf must do some hiding out. Yeah I am on duty, but I am hiding out. One major advantage to Guarding the Library is that not only do you have lots of keys but you have seen all the rooms and balconies and closets and lounges and offices that were built into the labyrinth that is the University Library.
There are a few place where no one goes- unless they remember where they are. Also it helps if you know where the signs are. Today I have a "closed for renovations" sign on the door. Since this hide out is a lounge at the end of a hallways that resulted from some genius admin deciding to rebuild this end of the 5th floor into study rooms most everyone save the cleaning staff has forgotten there is a lounge out here are the edge of the building. We share this hidey hole with the cleaning crews.
Well we agreed to forget that it is here so that we could use it as well.

So today, Butter and I are trading out turns at hiding out in the Study room. This arrangement works well since both of us have reasons and things to do out of the public eye. Me, I am finishing a book in peace, save for the occasional radio updates. Praying nothing disturbs the peace of the library which will call me away from the sanctuary.

the guards have one rule about this room.
1. no one but guards and cleaning staff can use it. that means no girl friends.

So far everyone has complied

so far.

Wally's World

His name was Wally.
Well his name was Wallace.
He was the Barney Fife of Security Guards. He was like Serious Smurf or Screwed Smurf more likely with what happened to him. There was this woman at the library who worked in reference. She was a major diva/bitch/tease/drama-queen/psycho. This is amazing bit of info as she worked and probably still works at that library on that campus still. It probably makes sense though- everyone ends up somewhere- many of the worst thought end up here.
Wally should have seen it coming.
Wally should have never thought he could take her on.
Hell, I knew I couldn't take her on, and still the temptation to mess around with her was awful.
She was trouble and women who are trouble just seem to be major magnets to men who want to go down in flames.

One Night, Wally swaggers in and makes his move on her.
The next night Wally staggers out, arrested for assault by his own beloved department and charged with sexual harassment

She is a pariah.

What happened?

The short answer would be proof of power.

The long answer goes like this.

Psycho Smurfette, was a librarian- which by their very natures (since the Music Man) are unattainable women by definition.
What was worse is that Psycho Smurfette was an attractive 30something who had a tight, compact 5 foot something body, with medium shapely breasts and a round well formed butt that could get a man's mind working like you would never believe possible. She wore her hair short but grab-able ( I am building up to it) She would tight slacks and pants that enhanced the roundness of each buttock and blouses that rode low enough to get imaginations rolling but high enough to be comfortable.

Wally must have been a goner from the beginning.

Her story ran like this:

Wally came onto her in her office and suggest that they make use of the privacy of the stacks. She declined- he persisted. She threatened him and he pushed her into a corner and groped her bosom.

Yes, that was the words she used- groping and bosom.

It was mostly a lie as it turned out.

She probably had something on the Library Admin, since he fell over himself to hand here Wally's head on a platter- the head of his favorite security guard- I might add. Wally was very good at what he did for the Library- the admins loved him- he had keys to all their private offices. In fact he had spent time there quite a bit.
I suspect that not only was Wally preferred over the other smurfs, that he was poking around with several other librarians and staff and someone got very jealous.

Wally came back by to see them after he was charged, fired and acquitted- the Judge laughed Psycho Smurfette out of the courtroom apparently. Wally said she looked extremely pissed. Still she had won- Wally lost the Job he worshiped.

Wally's story ran like this.

She was always asking for it. Even leaving him notes on places where they could meet up to "talk."

Wally showed us all the notes.

Butter choked up on a couple of them- and I knew that they had actually been meant for him. He looked sick since he hated Psycho Smurfette and loathed her. Poor Wally.

Anyway, Wally had tried meeting her in these places, she always acted surprised but as Wally puts in here. She would shimmy her butt and start flirting with him.

This of course, could mean she flirted with him or just sashayed by.

So according to Wally, the last night he worked. He was "Patrolling the Offices" (something only he was allowed to do) and there she was in her office.

Wally says that he went in and they talked and she came over and had him sit on her couch and then she sat on his lap. Wally says that "petting" began at that point with her rubbing his crotch and he groped her breasts. Then she pulled him up and over to her empty desk and he "bent her over the desk and had his way with her."
He added these notes to this as we sat there (most of us thinking- you stupid idiot)
She grunted while he "rode that sweet ass."
She had him pull her hair back as they did it.
They never were fully nude.
She came at least twice.
She made animal noises then purred like a cat afterward.
He left her with a grin on her face.

An evil grin as it turned out.

Wally concludes his story by telling us that he's got a new security job out a the Industrial park. If any of us want a job out there - he'll put in a good word for us.

Poor Wally, the whole time he's there he looks like a lost puppy wanting to come home.
When he leaves he passes the Psycho Smurfette- you can see in his frown than he is definitely remembering some act even if what he told us was complete bullshit.
She is aloof and barely glances at him. By the time she comes storming up to our desk. Butter has gone on Patrol. I am in the bathroom (peering out) and it's only the Russian sitting there.
She seethes and rages. He gives her the patented dead eye calm stare and shrugs.
She doesn't know he can actually speak English.

As I stare at her back, hell as I stare at her butt. I am imagining her bent over the desk, pants pulled down to her ankles, blouse pushed up over her breasts which are pressed against the wood of her desk. Her head is up and she is looking back as a security guard as they do it. Except, it's not Wally- it's me.
I know I have a major erection right now. I can't help it.
I know she's a psycho bitch but she has this ability to make you lust like you are Wally.

It's power pure and simple. I suspect that she enjoys the power more than anything even as I am disparately thinking about baseball, cold showers and digging ditches.

As she walks back by the Restrooms she looks straight into my face (I am caught like a opossum in the headlights) and she licks her lips and winks at me.

The Russian speaks on Women: A discourse

So there I sit with the Russian at the Security Desk.
He is telling me about eating healthy foods like Beef and Steak and Ribeye. I don't break it to him that they are in fact all Beef. That is when the most drop dead gorgeous woman walks up and says to the Russian.
"How come you never call?"
Then as I gawk at her slender body, perfect breasts, incredible hair, the smell of her perfume mixing with the musk of a foreign cigarette, look with lust into her perfect blue eyes, the two of them break down into a lengthy discourse in Russian.
It goes on and on. She sees me staring at her and smiles at me and suddenly winks. I think she is about to do more when the Russian jumps to his feet and yells at her.
"Sonja begone!"
Sonja frowns at him leans forward so I can stare down her cleavage, gets up from where she has been sitting propped on our desk, Gives me a sly smile and says
"Oh Sergei- (more Russian follows)." Then she turns her shapely butt to me and walks away as part of my screams in my mind that I would sell my soul to speak or at least understand Russian.
After she is gone, I look over at the Russian who looks back at me and shakes his head firmly.
"NO. My friend, these Russian women are bad news. They are Jezebels who take American husbands so that they can get out of Russia and bring their kids, then they will sex you and lie to you and divorce you so quick."
"Are you sure- cause Sonja she looked sincere." I hear myself say.

"BAh!" The Russian says. "Sonja is the worst. She has already divorce her Russian husband to marry an American so she can come here and divorce him too and get his money and bring her child from Moscow!"

I sigh seeing where this is headed.

"Brain- you don't want these Russian Women- they are pagan trash- you want good wholesome Christian women instead who will respect and honor you."

Baptist women- heavy set, fundamentalist, stay in the kitchen, fetch my slippers, bear me 12 children Christian Women. That is what the Russian wants.

The only women who come by either belong to Butter or are the Russian Jezebels who like the Russian and call him Sergei.

On the topic of women

When Butter is on shift there is a steady stream of women who come up to talk with him. He is always polite, cordial with them except for this one woman. He calls her Misty. I know it can't be her name- how many grungy  looking African-American women have you ever run into called Misty?
One day I ask and Butter laughs.
"Her name is Uttamandelfa." He says. I give him the look I reserve for freshmen.
"I ain't kidding you." Butter says. "Apparently her real name is something like Lydia or Laura but she wanted an  African name, so she made that one up."
"Oh."
"But I call her Misty because she is always misty-eyed."
"I don't get it." I reply.
"She smokes lots of dope man." He says in exasperation. "She's a dopehead."
"A stoner?"
"No shit."
"Wow."
"You said it man."
"So why don't you call her Stoner then?"
"I don't want to be cruel man."

Now for the Butter Smurf Song!

When women call him, they call him Butter

Not fly-guy, scrub or even cutter

And when they call him- he starts to stutter

Gotta get gotta get me some Butter!

So he says as his hands mime a train

What’s all this? What’s in a name?

Now his ladies start a shaking

For the sweet love he’s making

It might be a joke, it might be a game

Hey don’t hate the player, hate the game.

While his hands can do the speaking

His eyes do the sneaky seeking

His three finger gesture speculates

Enunciate the point he wants to make

With the guys he’s really fly

Way cooler than this white guy

On the court he can lay down the heat

A real machine cruising down the street

Yes, he is the master of the hip hop dance

Why he is the lover, the chocolate romance

He’s got game and a lot of fame

When those women see him they start to mutter

Gotta get gotta get me some Butter!

Butter gives me the (Ni@@er) Please! look that he thinks he has patented when I suggest that this should be his theme song. Butter is African American from Philadelphia. He tells me he took a wrong turn outside Cincinnati and ended up here in the southland. I know that he came down here to another university/college to do his Masters and somehow got sidetracked.

If you saw all the women who came around to see Butter each day then you would understand how I think he got sidetracked.

He leans back and says:

"Don't hate the player, hate the Game."

I agree not knowing whether we are back to talking about sports (which I hate) or women (who apparently hate me but not Butter).  

weaving my way home

when you work the graveyard shift, it is never a good idea to live over twenty minutes in any direction of where you work.
One night the radio squawks and the Lieutenant comes on and says:
"Badge 43 what's your 40?"
No answer from Badge 43.
I rouse myself from my stupor where I am squatting in a doorway in Zone A "The Hill" and think real hard who Badge 43 is. I have a vague idea that is Guard Falks (a thin non-white guy who also works the graveyard shift). He usually gets one of the outlying zones, tonight he is either in Zone F "AgriCamp" or Zone G "the Concrete Wasteland."
The Lieutenant never calls us by our names over the radio, only our badge numbers.
"Badge 43 what's your 40?" In case you don't know- thats a ten code for location. When the big L asks you better have exact location on the brain or you're toast.
Badge 43 never answers. I mentally picture the Lieutenant cussing up a storm as he dispatches a unit to go look for Badge 43. He never sends a unit unless he is quite sure you are dead, dying or going to want to be dead.
I know this cause he came after me once.
Word had gotten around that I was enjoying my post a little to much and he came out for a look. Now the irony of this is they want us awake and alert even though all we do is unlock doors. Still, we cannot enjoy sitting around all night waiting for twilight to start actually working. So all us Smurfs have come up with ways to stay cool, awake, warm, not bored.
Bored being the operative word.
Hence the reason, I am squatting in a doorway.
The night the Lieutenant came for me I had been posted in Zone C "The bomb-block" a university lab building that supposedly had a reactor in it. Everything was magnetically locked shut, so I wasn't guarding anything that I could even get into. So I had brought my cart with me.
The cart had a little tv monitor on it, game system (n64) and VCR on it plus an extension cord. I like the cart because it was easy to unload and move in and hide so I could have something to fill the hours with other than a book or worse the patterns on the wall. Anyway, let's just say the big L was less than impressed that I was alert and being entertained while babysitting the Bomb-block. So here I am squatting in a doorway in the dead of night. At least he didn't confiscate the cart. but staying awake is a bitch.

Turns out Badge 43 would agree with me, most nights he would show up to roll call, then goto post, sit from radio check, then go home to his apartment (within 4 minutes of his post) and go to bed, with an alarm set for our radio checkins - except for tonight when he forgot to set the alarm and missed his check. When he rolled back in this morning he turned in his keys and his uniform. The Big L doesn't forgive sleepers.

Now all I have to do is drive back 20 minutes to my house without falling asleep at the wheeel after freezing my ass off in a doorway all night. Yaay me!

Exhaustion

Working the graveyard shift is when you realize you have no life at all.
Your days are spent in sheer exhaustion.
Sleep is elusive and only comes when you are not looking.
You tend to wake up in strange and weird places and wonder how you got there.
This is how Fight Club Started.
Insomnia.
sleeplessness.
leads
to mind
numbing
exhaustion.

I leave the room before I pass out..

Sometimes you're the bug

Traffic Duty, Football game.

"Hey, why do they call you guys Unarmed Security?"

This from an incredibly fat cop- Sometimes it amazes me how fat these cops can get and still have jobs as cops.  What is even weirder is that these guys are pretty good cops even if they are not going to bother with a footrace and will probably shoot the offender and swear they were pulling a gun later.

"Because we have no arms." Hervey says without missing a beat.

Fat cop gives Hervey the evil cop eye then bursts out laughing. Cop Humor. Sometimes it is better not to know.

"No Really." The Fat Cop asks after guffawing and gasping. "Why?"

"Well- that's a long story." Hervey begins. "you see many many years ago-"

Hervey's radio Barks out a 10 code and Hervey grabs it gives it the 10-4 and trots off down the street.

The Fat Cop looks at me and this ticket writer who is also working.

"So?"

"Well the short of it was sometime back there was this couple who had a car and they came to the foortball game and did not listened to this security guard when he told them not to drive down the street and then the security guard pulled his weapon and shot out their rear window and that is why there are no real armed security guards anymore."

"And?"

"Nope that's about it."

"I don't believe you."

"Well Barry here will tell you what really happened." and I point at the ticket writer who faints dead away out of sheer terror at being asked to do so.

The Fat Cop laughs and tells me I am alright.

Sometimes you are the windshield...

Traffic control.
To a policeman (person) it's donning the vest, getting the neon gloves, the whistle and girding on authority then walking out into a street with the certainty that no one will hit you with their car. It takes "bells of Steel" unless you are woman of course then it probably takes tits of iron. No matter the inappropriate metaphor- the amount of courage and foolishness often go hand in hand. The thing to remember is to blow the whistle loudly and sharply. Had gestures need to be practiced and to the point. No quavering, quivering allowed.

To a security guard it's donning the vest, looking for gloves, borrowing a whistle (or running down to the surplus store before work with a wad of cash since you DO NOT WANT A PIECE OF CRAP whistle. Getting the authority from the policeman and wading out into human traffic. Yes there are a few select guards allowed to direct cars, but only a few. The rest of the time we get to harass- I mean direct the flow of human beings in and around the traffic.

One night, I am out on assignment and a older guy and a bunch of athletes come to my position. Everything is fine until the old guy steps down into the street. Without turning from my position, I yell "Get back on the curb Sir!" He stops looks at me in surprise and then after a curt hand gesture (nothing but professional hand gestures from the traffic handbook I can assure you) he nods and gets back on the curb.
A moment later I turn to find this enormous football jock in my face.

"Hey, you can't do that! You can't tell him that!"

"Well." I reply and point large- did I say much larger than me footballjock? -back to the curb. He goes although it looks like he is going to kill me at any moment. "Not only I can do that but I will."

"No you can't." Says another athlete- a very self-assured one. "They named this street after him- it is his street."

"Well that is all fine and dandy, pal. But right now this IS MY STREET AND I WILL DETERMINE WHO AND WHAT CROSSES IT WHEN THAT GUY OVER THERE TELLS ME TOO AND NOT BEFORE."
I point to the police officer in the Intersection. "AND NO ONE IS GOING TO DEFY ME NOT EVEN YOU AND THE ENTIRE FOOTBALL TEAM, YOU GET ME?"

They all look at me like I am nuts but they all nod. The old guy gives me a quiziccal look, then turns a shade of embarrassed and nods. They wait for me to say when it is time to go and cross my street.
After they are long gone I look up at the street sign. Sure enough, the street is named for the head coach at the University- the legendary head coach.
I am sooooo dead.

I radio in.
"Sargeant Wilks, this is Gaurd #42 at the corner of "such and such" (no I am admitting nothing)?"

"Go ahead officer."

"I might have just stepped in it sir- I think I just told the head coach to get back on the curb during traffic control in front of the entire football team. Over."

A whistle comes back over the radio.

"Do we we even have a 10 code for that?"

"No I don't think so, Brainy."

"Parks?" Francine voice came over the radio.

"Yes Ma'am."

"If Coach (so and so) complains I will personally ask him why he was jaywalking in front of his boys. You are fine. Keep up the good work."

"Yes Ma'am!"

In memory of my best friend

I pause today, to thank all the people in the world who remember that Love can conquer all if we will only let it into our hearts and minds.
                                                "Time is precious, do not waste it." In Memory of the man who inspired me to blog all of this. Ray White. 1913- 2012

A moment in the Sun

In jobs like this, in a life like this, there are only a few moments in the sun.

This is one of them.

Let's go play in traffic.

Well, I am going to go play in traffic. I have a shield.

You will have to use your imagination or get run over.

fallout in the stacks

About a week after the body had been discovered, recovered and investigated a professor's family filed a missing person's report. Dr. Famish (I am not kidding) had gone missing after failing to call his mother (age 93) in a month. According to Barney, he swore the old woman had said that he son, now confirmed to be the body in section 4D would call every week to check in on her. Barney said she said "I kept thinking I should call someone but by the time I remember to call I couldn't remember what I was calling about."
What is even more unbelievable is when they finally found the log where Dr. Famish had signed in and never signed out the proverbial pooh had hit the fan and several staffers had been repositioned in the worst jobs the Admins could come up with.
Dr. Famish had died from natural causes apparently right after arriving in his office. But since there was a strict "Do not disturb" policy on those offices nothing short of a fire or Atomic attack would have gotten anyone to bother him.
Needless to say, the guards were issued keys, "knock first" instructions and told to periodically sweep the offices from time to time. We guards were told to stay out of the offices and the keys we checked for by the Admins randomlty- which meant for a month they were riding us every other day and then they forgot and moved on to other jobs.

Vintage refused to ever go back to the 4th floor. On rounds he would stay at the stairs while his partner swept the floor or patrolled it. He always got a sick shaky look on his face whenever he went near any of the offices and soon he was seldom seen anywhere at the library except on rare occasions.
Thanks to his reaction, the cleaning crew refused to clean section 4D without an escort being convinced of it being cursed and haunted. Many of them bolted every time a weird or unusual noise came from that area and had to be reassured that they would not be eaten by the famished ghost (I am not kidding) of the fourth floor stacks.

Creepy tales from the back of the stacks

University libraries are by their very nature, quite different from other more normal libraries. Our library is huge and has many things that normal libraries do not. For one thing, this one is a huge ziggarut type building high up on a hill. This helps a whole lot of determined perverts using super telephoto lenses to spy on surrounding dorms of the female persuasion to further their perversions. There are also many hidey-holes created by the mazes of book shelves, a plethora of private study rooms and then there are the offices scattered through out the second through fourth floors.
These office are arranged along certain areas facing windows on the outer edges of the second and third floors, and along 2 sections of the inner stacks on the fourth floor. They are small single chamber units that are free standing inside the stacks like a child lining up a set of building blocks on the floor free from the library walls and internal structure. The end result is that each office has a door and at least one window. In some ways they are self-contained worlds unto themselves.
Each of these offices are supposedly issued to professors and researchers so that they can come to the library and do research away from the distractions of people. What they are in truth is semi-autonomous dens of inquiry, free action, and other perversions and distractions especially since almost no one but the occupants have keys to them. In short, the Guards and even the cops don't have keys to them. The library Admins say they have the keys but I have yet to see one of them produce one.

Case in point. About a month before I came on shift, one of the Admins sent a request down that several of the cleaning staff and a few library works had reported an odd smell coming out of the office block on 4D (4th floor, 4th section of offices). Since no one could come up with the key, the Admins sent a request down to circulation to find out which professor had offices in that block. I came on shift while the library was doing all this research through their records. One thing to note, was even at that time not a whole lot had been put on computer so the searches were going through file drawers of hand written records. Meanwhile the strange smells were continuing to come from Section 4D.
Finally, someone found a peice of paper identifying four of the six offices and their occupants. All of whom were located and confirmed that they had not used their offices so far that semester. By that point the smell was overpowering although no one could really say what the smell- smelled like!
At this point, it was decided that Vintage Smurf would take a set of universal keys up to Section 4D and do an office to office search. An hour passed and no one could reach Vintage so the Library Admins sent Butter to find Vintage. Another 30 minutes passed and finally Butter radioed in that he had located Vintage in a bathroom near Section 4D "puking his guts out."
At this point, the Library Admins panicked and called the City Cops who called the University Cops and told them to clean up their own mess. The University Cops came in and went in search of Butter and began to bitch him out for wasting their time when one of them caught a whiff of the odor and said. "man this place reeks of death." and it all snapped into place.
The four lucky cops and Butter ran down to the offices and found the fith out of six office doors open and inside- the cause of Vintage's distress. The mostly desiccated corpses of a man sitting facing the opposite wall of the office. The smell in that cramped office was overpowering and Butter and two of the four cops joined Vintage in the bathroom. One of the cops didn't make it and ended up using a paper recycling box instead.
It took another call to the city, a crime scene crew, a fleet of city officers and the city morgue the entire afternoon to clean up that mess.
When I came on shift that night most of the fourth floor was cordoned  off. Cops and technicians everywhere. hundreds of redundant questions being asked and piles of paperwork being pulled and library staff scrambling to find out who the dead man was.
A few thing were known.
1. He had been dead close to a month at least.
2. He was in a state of advanced decomposition
3. The stench was worse since these office had no air vents which meant barely any airflow
4. somebodies head was going to be rolling over this one
5. somebody was going to have to take the fall so the guilty could get away with this particular FUBAR.

What a mess.
Tomorrow I will conclude thie one. Right now I got to go see if Vintage has stopped throwing up yet.

There's a centaur in here somewhere

OK, one of the strangest things in the University Library is the case that has the centaur fossil in it. Yes, I said Centaur fossil and library. There is this case in one of the lounges with a centaur skeleton in it. under glass as if it had been found and brought in partially dug up. According to the clap trap around the stacks, a long time back the anthropology department got really bored and cooked up this urban myth, even created a digsite for the discovery and phot op and all kind of outrageous stuff. The centaur is life size albeit a little small for a horse, although plenty big enough to be a man. In case any of you don't watch or play greek myth based tv or video games or read books- a centaur is a half-man/half horse hybrid that supposedly wondering around golden age Greece.
It is all bullshit, I know it and the other guards know it although I am not sure the Russian is completely convinced. But this doesn't include everyone. Oh no, there is a section of the library population that is convinced that this was an actual bona-fide centaur.

What makes this worse is there are several that not only belief that is a actual skeleton of a centaur but that his ghost is roaming the stacks too. Why? No one is actually sure. Butter says that Barney and another guard named Roger Roger are to blame for this.
Apparently there were some pretty gullible Chinese or Korean students who believed them when they were told this myth about the ghost of the centaur roaming the stacks. Barney and RR thought it would be great to use their radios to pull this farce off and one night they staged a haunting of the stacks accompanied by the clopping of hooves, neighing and whinnying of a horse and cloppity clopping at full gallop to scare the bejeezers out of two of these poor kids. Barney and RR had a good laugh about this until dispatch sent some uniforms to locate the four hooved criminal trespasser and the truth came out. RR got reassigned and Barney got a firm talking too.
This only inspired the 2 to expand on the haunting and from time to time the night would be filled with the haunting of our Centaur plus on campus spotting's of the Ghost. RR finally bit of more than he could chew one night and the next night cleaned out his locker and Barney let it go.
Only it was too late.
Now we get sighting calls and mysterious noises calls from time to time as the legend of the ghost Centaur gets passed from one exchange student to the next.
Sometimes you will spot a small cluster of them approaching the display case housing the "skeleton" with reverence and respect.

Last week, one of them left a rice cake for it.

still back in the Stacks

The Russian looks at me one day and says:
"You know Brains, I been told that there is this sick man, very sick man who goes around the stacks at early evening looking for girls, young girls who are asleep and he spills his seed on them as they sleep in the stacks. have you ever heard of this man?"

I take a long look at the Russian and remind myself to shake my head.

"I tell you Brain, if I ever catch this man I will choke him so hard that his head burst just like grape."
Any moment he is going to DAH! isn't that what all big muscle bound Russians say right before they pummel you into oblivion?
Actaully he says: "Right? Am I right?"
I nod.
Anyone who crosses the Russian is going to be a crushed grape. He is 6 foot 5 inches. He is all muscle and speaks like a purer version of Bavarian than Arnold. Hell he would be Conan if he weren't a Christian- some kind of Baptist I think. Very devout and very pure. The Russian never swears, cusses or drinks. When he speaks, one often gets the impression he learned his English from the King James version of the Bible, that and a whole bunch of pretty scarey Baptist Missionaries.

I am not sure if I would be any less afraid of him if he was a vodka drinking, pagan/atheist Communist. The Russian is not and what's more, he is almost likable except when he starts going on about this particular pervert who does- or at least according to Barney (consider the source) goes around and masturbates over young girls who decide to take naps in the carrels or on the couches up there in the stacks. No one I have ever heard of save for Barney and a rather sleazy-scummy librarian named Wormy have ever "seen" this perv. Still, with all the weirdos we do get in here the "Mad Masturbator" (as Barney calls him) has yet to show his "head" on any of my shifts or the Russians now that I think about it. I will have to ask Hervey about him sometime- he'd probably know for sure.

In the meantime the Russian is ready for the two of us to go and look for this Library myth for the third time this shift- which is two times less than the last time I was on shift with the Russian.

lost in the Stacks

Think of every horror movies that had a library in it, not many, so think about the metropolitan library in Ghostbusters, ok maybe too many books and maybe too old. The University library is newer like only 40 year old rather than over a hundred. The stacks are not haphazard, but the disigner/architect built the building in such a way that the stack layout doesn't yield a clear view down the whol of a floor, rather the sight lines are regularly interrupted which make floor sweeping only partially successful. In short, we often miss things and people in the stacks.
At one time fiction was easier to sweep because the books are smaller than non-fiction and you could see through the gaps in the shelves- not 100% but better than it was, that is until some brilliant admin decided that the fiction collection could be condensed by "double shelving" and now there is no gaps between the shelves.
A lot of stuff goes on in the stacks, it often surprises me as I walk them what you are likely to encounter there. There are other places where human mischief or laziness get the better of people but in the stacks it seems to become more concentrated in practice.
What do I mean by this?
Let me give you some examples.
Here are some things that happened to Barney, the oldest surviving guard (by that I mean he had been in the Library the longest- not the most experienced just the longest to make it without get fired or giving up) Anyway this was Barney's favorite story- one which he would tell anytime the staff or Admins or our own superiors were thought to be out of earshot.
"Brainy (actually he had taken to calling me Shakespeare, who knows?), there are ways to let things be and still get the job done." Barney (whose name might have been Wally now that I think of it) leaned over and say and give me that Barney Fife knowing wink.
"Oh?" I said trying to sound enthused "How would one go about that exactly."
Barney then would tap the side of his nose with a long index finger and nod.
"Brainy my young friend, these kids like to have sex in the stacks."
He would wait for a gasp. After a moment I got it and give him the perfunctory  gasp.
"Yes, these kids are little horn-dogs. I give them full marks for effort, but if you just get them to have their sex in the stacks away from the common areas- then" Barney spreads his hands and arms wide over the desk and then gave me another Barney wink.
"Then?"
"Then one does not have to interrupt and often it can be watched as long as they aren't too loud or messy."
(Ugh)
"I have seen it work in action, I have."
(and there you have it folks- Library porn.)
"Oh come on." I say and realize we are whispering like conspirators.
"Oh not me per-say." Barney says in a self-declamatory manner. "No, not me but Old Hendricks he told me all about it, where to go and when was the best time-" Barney shoots me a glance "When would you say is the best time to have sex in the stacks?"
It takes a second to figure out that was actually a question for me. I shrug and say something about 1AM and wonder why I am doing so.
"Oh no, not that late." Heh heh- he laughs gruffly "right after lunch." he waits
I roll my eyes and give myself another mental head slap and curse Woodchuck for giving me this shift with Barney.
"Why after lunch?" I drawl out dreading the answer.
"Because-" Barney pauses and gives me his considering look (which let me say looks like a suspicious Arnold at his poor brother Willis from Different Strokes) "Well Hendricks said that was when most of the Library staff became the most docile and stopped moving around in the stacks until 3-ish."
I bet Barney here has tested this theory time and time again. Now that I think of it, Barney almost always works first shift and never takes lunch at 12. Why me?
"Hendricks said the best place was in Nonfiction on fifth floor near the maintenance rooms cuase it has the worst sight lines in the building. Good for them."
I wonder who "them" are supposed to be.
"Them horny kids I tell ya." Barney says.
Dumb me had to ask that out loud.
"Now don't go spreading that around, and ruin a good thing." He glances at his watch, stands up and straightens his over loaded equipment belt and gives me the sly wink.
"I got to go make my rounds."
I glance at the clock on the wall.12;50pm.
Of course...

Just another book on a long shelf

Life is like a library, sometimes you get checked out, sometimes you get checked in, sometimes you are left to molder on a shelf and then sometimes you get lost. The library staff mostly impresses me as those who got lost on their way to some other place.
Julia definitely got lost. She's middle forties and pretty much complains all day. She even complains as a means of greeting and goodbye. To this date I have never met anyone who complained about so little or so much. She works the checkout desk and complains. Still she is a great source for the network of who was doing what to whom and where in the stacks it might be taking place.
Cesspool Samson is another lost soul. He is a mountain of a man and I mean mountain like 4 to 5 hundred pounds of unwashed man who moves rarely, always works late and often is left alone. The reason for his nickname is that his BO was so overpowering that no one could be close to him for more than a minute or two before dry heaving ensued or worse- not dry heaving!
I felt bad for Cesspool and tried to never refer to him as such but it was hard since it seemed he never got the hints about washing. I mean I felt sorry for him at a distance.
That is until shift change one night not long ago, Hervey rolls in and says with a wicked SE grin on his face. "CP is out of gas-"
I mention that could be a good thing since one had to be very careful lighting up around him.
Then Hervey drops his own bomb.

"The chief wants to know if you would go get him some gas on your way out."

Damn my luck

Damn my inability to say no.

Lost in the Land of Books

The University Library is a world unto itself. Once you are pulled into its orbit, much of reality that exists beyond it walls ceases to be that prevalent. People have been know to get lost in the stacks for years... well not completely literally but then again you never know.
Butter came there with big plans to get his master's degree and stayed for years and years. I never knew whether the mastery ever did get achieved. He did outlast us all as a guard though, so I suspect he got the last laugh.
The staff of the Library was much the same, few were really there by choice or design, most had come there looking for something else and stayed for various reasons. A few - a very few escaped immediately.
1. Frank- I am going to call him Frank was one of them, He wanted to be a movie star but he ended up like the guy in the Piano Man song except he could be found in the library and not the bars. He had some kind of checkout job. What I knew of him was he would audtion for everything and get nothing unless the role involved no pay. The great actor who everybody liked but not the guys with money anyways.
2. Bill, yeah I actually think that could be his name. He was a tall thin guy with a scruffy beard. One of the most laid back guys I have ever known. Nothing fazed him. Someone told me he had like three doctrates but never did anything about them. He was in and out of reference and seemed to be a floater from department to department. Mostly Bill specialized in staying under the radar of the Admins. We guards decided that Bill was in witness protection and collectively admired and feared him.
3. Eduwardo De Frances, No it is a pseudonym, I don't remember his name save that it was about that fancy. He was modestly cultured and semi-elite. Gay but not announced and like to haul around this car phone (not a cell but the original car phone). The car phone had a handset and base unit that stayed in a bag. the keypad was on the outside of the handset on the top. It was actually one of the very few car phones I ever had seen. He used it like a cell phone though. It complimented him completely, Eduwardo was smooth and clean and had pretty awful dental work. Still I liked him since if you ever needed the low down on the goings on, he was the man to ask.
4. Miranda or "Boookends" - no I am not sure exactly why she was called that, but there probably was a good reason for it. Bookends was your typical depictions of a librarian, frumpy clothing and the glasses on a chain around her neck. She would have been the stereo typical librarian save that she was 25-something and kind of attractive if you could  find her smiling which was pretty rare. Occassionally you could spot down in the stack grinning at some book.

More to come.

In the Library...

Now I will tell you all about the most interesting place to be a Smurf.
the Library- that's the University Library, a very big building filled mostly with books and book shelves.
The Library Smurf differs from the other Guards because we stay in the same place all the time and we handle problems more directly than the "Watch and Radio it in" policy of the outside Smurfs.

I will start by identifying the Library Guards in true smurf-like fashion: (I am going to leave but you the reader can feel free to add in the smurf extensions to each name)
1. Gungho otherwise known as Hervy (not his real name- heck I am not sure I either remember or even knew his real name)
2. Player- otherwise known as Butter. Think smooth as butter and you will get an idea of what Butter was like
3. Vintage- otherwise known as Codger. He had come up from ticket writing and always seemed stuck between the two jobs. His nickname is an age reference since he was at least 20 year older than the rest of us- no I never knew exactly how much older.
4. Russian- otherwise know as the Russian or Brarishnikov (ok his name was something else but I am not telling you or anyone else what it really was he was a good guy but weird like the rest of us) Yes he was actually a Russian from Russia.
5. Deputy- otherwise known as Barney Fife. There is always a "Barney Fife" type character on almost every security guard force I have ever seen. Barney Fife is the quintessential bumbling by-the-book often over equipped stereotype that inevitably appears on the force. Our Barney Fife was a close match to the Mayberry one.
6. Brainy- (that's me) otherwise know as Sidekick, since I guess I was always party to everything.
and lastly
7. Danger- othersie know as Hervy's brother or Kruger (and no I have no idea what his name was or why we started calling him Kruger)

There were also the Library staff and Admins who now that I think about it had a lot in common with Gargamel  and his minions.
The more notable ones were:
1.The Ogre (don't the Shrek in this case) think Gargamel or Sauron. He was seldom seen, often heard and always felt as the chief admin of the library. In the Library he was the King (at least in his own mind) Funny I saw his offices regularly but almost never saw him.
2. The Psychophant- deliberately mispelled and reworded- should be Psychotic sycophant but psychophant worked better. She was the foaming at the mouth, eager to please her dark masters assistant Admin of the building and unlike her boss was often seen, always avoided and thought she was the quuen bee of the library.


more soon. .  

On Cops and other things police worthy

I am aware always that people make snap judgments about the Police and the cops that one comes across. Lately, Cops are getting a largely bad rep, of course, that is not much to say since they almost always have bad reps.
A lot of this stigma comes with the powers they are granted and the orders they are expected to carry out. There are however several things one should consider before you pass judgment of these men (mostly men) and women.

1. Cops/the Police/Law Enforcement Officers/more titles and slang names abound are human beings who are constantly in the public eye and thus their personalities and actions are exemplified often to their detriment and that of their profession to boot. Cops are mortal men and women who are fallible yet expected to be exemplary of what they should be or could be.
2. Cops make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. The problem is that some mistakes carry heavier consequences than others. Give a man or woman a gun and the powers and responsibilities that come with the badge and the fallout from their mistakes are tenfold what the average man or woman could manage. 
3. Every cop has taken an oath to serve and protect. It is important to remember what these cops have sword to protect and who they are serving. The answers should be the obvious, but it is largely left to the interpretation of what each cop and their department consider to be society, civilization, citizenry, the state/nation and the law. Cops are law enforcement officers, they are there to obey and enforce the consequences of breaking the law. Sometimes they are considered to be Peace Officers and are there to keep the peace. This also is largely a matter of interpretation.
4. Cops are like people and when you speak of them in terms of which it is important to remember that while there are good cops and bad cops, nice cops and tough cops, friendly cops and decidedly unfriendly cops; they are not unlike people in other occupations- they all have dreams and ambitions that may not match your own. There is one real important detail to take note of and that is, they can arrest you (given enough justification of course).

There are other things but for my purposes, I will stick with these. I started this job with one set of expectations and have ended up with an almost completely different set at this point. While I was outside, I got to see Cops not as a blank uniform group of men and women but as individuals with fallacies and strengths that helped and hindered them as they worked through decidedly stressful days and nights. 

So, the short answer is always yes, but also no, because Cops are people too. Albeit, people with guns.

So I am standing there...

"Unbelievable- isn't it?"
I look over  to find this guard Hervey? Yeah that was his  name Hervey. That's what  the  dispatch officer had called him when we were summoned up here.
"Completely."
"Don't  worry we'll get him." He says sounding completely sure of it.
Me?  I am not so sure.
Turns out  we were both right. We did get him (midsquat I might add) but it would take months to corner him nevermind figure out who he was. None of that matters now, I don't  want to go back outside. So I volunteer to sweep the stacks with this Hervey guy. Turns out we have a few things in common. The big one of course is neither of us is in to taking much in the BS department. We are both older than the other students. Both of us plans to be something else but take our  jobs serious enough to hate being called "unarmed."
So we go on our first sweep of the stacks. To Hervey,  he enjoys the  company. To me- hell I am on  the inside instead of being out in that parking garage they had posted me  to.
We end up taking long enough for the dispatch officer to radio looking for me and I have to return to the parking garage. As he walks me out, he says
"Ever think of coming inside- becoming a Library Guard?"
"I am now" I say and decide to find  out how I can pull that off.

The Mad Shitter

There are things most Libraries never admit to in the light of day, that haunt the shadows in the Stacks. There are stories and tales that scare the bejeezers out of rookies. Nut this one takes all the prizes. I won't tell the whole story, but I will give you the story of the Mad Shitter in three parts- because I can.
Part of this story starts with Hervey, Our heavy hitter Security Guard- our self appointed Master Sergeant of the Library Guards.
Hervey is a pretty big guy and can throw his weight around. He wanted to be career military but threw out his back as he was throwing out the garbage. (some of that was true- but again I ain't sayin' which) Hervey- if you are reading this, don't come over and do some chirpo-kunfu on me!
Anyway, Hervey (I like the name dammit) could take care of himself- they typically did not make you a library guard if you couldn't hold your ground against thre homeless guys and a rusty steak knife. Hervey was believed to have carved up some steak with that rusty knife, but I digress
Ok, here is the setup.
Hervey has the graveyard shift at the Library- that means he works from 11 to 7am and it is just him, a handful of die hard students. 1 or two unlucky library staff memebers who pull this duty and Hervey. The first time I met him in fact was on a call trying to catch the "Mad Shitter" in the act.
Since the "real" University cops had better things to do, they rounded us up from our many scattered posts and brought us to perform a footrace through the stacks after the ever elusive almost mythical Mad Shitter.

Now I know what you are asking yourself and probably your spouse what the hell does he mean by "Mad Shitter." Well let me tell you my friend and those of you who aren't friends with me or even friendly. It does not mean that he got mad when he went to the bathroom,.

I walk into the main bathroom on the main floor not 20 feet from the Security Desk and let out a whistle as the scene of carnage surrounds me with the smell of feces (and by that I mean shit). The Mad Shitter "takes a dump" as Sgt Yolks points out as he stares in amazement. Anyway, this translates as he takes a massive bowel movement in the middle of the bathroom floor and then picks up the feces and smears it across as much of the surface area of the bathroom as he can make it go. Then as a finishing touch, sticks as much toilet paper and paper towels into clumps of it as he can manage, no rhyme or reason to any of it.

And there you have it. The man of feces is completely nuts and yet he can slip through our nets we have set to catch him.

Another brick in the wall

Typically being referred to as "another brick in the wall' means someone is trying to insult you. As a Security Guard, it's not so bad, especially when you realize that the wall is exactly where  you want to be. One of the strengths any force  has is numbers. There more people  who are there to watch your  back,  the less likely you are going to get singled out and  pummeled by some deranged concert attendee.
Case in point.
There is this band and I use the term loosely. Limp Bizkit may be adored by thousands of fans but  I suspect few of  them are cops. I have worked my fair share of  concerts but that LB concert takes the cake for pure chaos.
At first , everything was  "normal and fine." What  I mean by that is the  opening acts sucked but were tame.  The attendees were reasonably calm and  only mildly  belligerent. Then after several sets of awful music (and I use that term loosely as well)  LB finally  takes the stage and open with what must have been their top 100 pop song. I look at the team of uniforms I am with and Eddy the state cop wafts his hand  up and down - indicating he  thinks it was only so-so. The other guys shrug- no one is particularly  impressed.
Then the  lead singer - heck if I  know who he is- steps forward and starts this half rant half pep talk. It  goes something like this.
(FYI- the higher ups  had  decided that  a mosh pit was out  of the question since according to claptrap several moshers from a  concert in Georgia had to be hospitalized last week)
"Hey yall,, are we pumped?'
Standard mob mentality rules apply here. There  is an affirmative roar.
"Hey yall- We're going to have that mosh pit no matter what any body says! So just come  up here any of you who want to. If the  cops don't like it then Fuck the cops we do what we want!" or  something like that. Accounts vary as  to what the  little popstar said. Some people claim  he never swore or cussed while  others said he had called us all pigs. Whatever  he did or did not say, mob mentality ruled over anything and everything else.
I turned to see the flood of human bodies coming charging at the line of cops in front of the stage. Most of them  got  out of  the way in time. I think  I saw Bill the county  cop go down, I started shouting and waving  in his direction  as the little punk  on stage started the next "song" as if everything was fine and dandy.
So here our little band of cops stand in a corner  of this utter chaos, loud  and by loud I  mean deafening music blaring. bodies flying around the Mosh pit.
The first blood  I see is one a mosher covered in blood, it streaming out of a  oddly bent nose. What started as a bad concert is now a free for all riot.
LB goes on as if  everything is normal. next song and the riot continues with even  more crazed fans  trying to climb over the barricade.
Then I get the call. We beat a strategic retreat to the  nearest exit and join up with most  of the rest of the force  at the concert. There is Francine and a Sergeant Fox giving orders in  a calm collect fashion. We  are reordered based on size and  ability and in we  go in a wedge.
A wall of cops.
The  wedges works wonders as  we divide and subdue the moshers  many of whom look relieved to be removed from the  riot.
We  are in the midst of sorting bodies and  cornering the more violent and  resistant moshers when the music dies midsong and  LB  takes a "break."
There you have it. I am one happy brick  in  the wall in the face  of  insanity.

Another name for the blues

Hello everyone. life has been a little hectic here lately, but we all must buck up and do our part.
That's what Captain Woodchuck has to say today at roll call for us guards.
Words of motivation and inspiration are not Captain Woodchucks' forte. He is a good natured fellow who will go to bat for you most of the time. However, the "captain" part of his title is not really all that official. Captain Woodchuck is not a police officer. He is not even a security guard. Rumor has it he is one of the tried and true original ticket writers who started that job while he was majoring in political science and stuck with it until the University police chief figured he would have to give Woodchuck a promotion. So he made him head ticket writer and then when none of the Lieutenants nor the other watch captain's wanted sovereignty over the guards, he gave Woodchuck that job as well.

Lets have three cheers for our Captain Woodchuck! Ok I didn't actually think I would even get one cheer.

That one time at Band Camp

Summers on a University Campus are at best measured chaos.
Universities think that the best way to encourage education in everyone is to have even younger kids come there during the summer. Summer camps abound over the hot dog days and children of ever increasingly younger ages flood into what was only weeks before the party dorms of the campus. Oh the irony.
The scholars bowl camp takes the cake though. Imagine if you will hundreds of bright young minds who gather for a week on the campus with one thing on their minds..... pin swapping.
yes, pin swapping.
They come and compete in intellectual battles over a variety of historical and hysterical puzzlers, then bombard each other and everyone in between, especially the cops with pins (badges) that border on lunacy. The cops are expected to arbitrate, collect and disperse said pins to hordes of grabby kids who are WAY too friendly and eager to barter over the pins (of Destiny- say it ignominiously)
So there I am quaking in terror as several thousand kids coming racing across the sward, their state pins, theiir school pins, their school club pins and their school extra curricular activities pins in hand waving them at us in enthusiastic cries of wild abandon.
Here I stand with my fellow guards holding a handful of coveted UT police pins against the hordes of children headed our way.
This is the life.....not.
Still it's time and a half...
and it beats working at Regal Cinemas..... well it beats working at McDonald's. 

Guarding Francine since Tess was taken

The best thing about being a Smurf- I mean a Security guard- is guarding a woman or even better than that working for a lady cop. Notice I said "lady" cop since as we all know there are women out there you would put your life down on the line for and women you would run screaming like little nerdy white guys from.

I'll admit it.
Women in Uniform make me feel very good. Perverted or not the feeling is actually a curious mix of protective pride and admiration.
There is this "lady" cop.
And I am going to call her Francine (Tess was already taken and no neither of those is her actual name- its that feeling about her that makes me not call her by name here)
Francine, is all cop but still all woman at the same time. What I mean by that is you would be working with her- she being a Sergeant usually meant she was in charge and by in charge I mean that when she blew that whistle and yelled everyone including the motorist jumped to obey.
All woman meant that you paid attention to her, because she was charming and funny even when the situation warranted caution and seriousness. Seriously, I always wanted to be around her even when she had to be mean. We (and by that I mean all the guards, most of the School division cops and at least a few of the University cops) would have followed her into hell with nary a smile or a look back. Hell, we did follow her lead into some pretty crazy situations including a drunken brawl in the football stadium, a riot in a mosh pit at a Limp Bizcuit concert and into a mob of drunken frat boys- no wait maybe that was the football thing all over again.
She even came to my rescue once.
What was ironic about that was that I had spotted a guy in prison colors (jumpsuit) crossing the sward at a football game and radioed it in. I said one police 10 code and he had heard another. the other 10 code translated as officer down (they were like 10-50 and 10-05). So I was trailing the guy through the crowd when I got a "what's your location call" and as I gave it, this flood of cops came over the hill to my right, Francine leading the charge.
I was impressed.
Francine was upset.
Her men were pissed.
I was in love.
The poor idiot in the jumpsuit was pretty surprised when four cops surrounded him with guns drawn.
Turned out he had not in fact escaped from the county lockup- the irony there was the prison jumpsuit was the exact same colors as the University's football team and he had thought it would be a good idea to wear it to the game.
Francine, never once yelled at me about it. When she understood what had happened she took a deep breath radioed the station got the right 10 code on record and told the dispacther to try to listen more carefully to the Guards- that they were as equally important to the force as any cop.
She checked on me to make sure I was ok, and then she led the force back to their positions for the game.
She was a "lady" and a cop.
She probably still is a lady and a cop.
She was and still is my favorite lady cop.

In case you didn't get that.

April Fools!

I love the internet and every effort that is spent in fooling the masses.

The smurfs are still here and yes we are still unapologetic to the little french blue guys and their wall street lawyers. If you want to sue someone sue the us police forces who insist on dressing up like smurfs.
I mean what what so wrong with Navy blue and black uniforms or better yet Khaki uniforms. We guards could be wearing Dockers and Old Navy instead of dollies and starchy bright blue shirts and velcro ties.

an announcent of epic porportions

This has been utter and mostly humorless lie and I  am sorry that I had the fortune to have to write it. Most of all  I want to apologize to the little blue French  People and ticket writers everywhere for not taking their emotional sensitivity into consideration when I talked about their goldfish and mothers  in such  a fashion.

there are 2 lives for a smurf...security guard- i mean

There are 2 lives  for security smurfs- I mean guards.
1.  Outside Smurf. This is graveyard shifting at its worst. Let me paint this picture for you.  The Lieutenant or the Police Chief in their infinite wisdom hatched this genius plan. Let's hire  a bunch of fairly reliable people to come into work at 11pm. Meet  in the Briefing  room for 30 minutes then be given a wad of keys, allen keys and assorted instruments for unlocking doors, then get sent out  to various areas around a given (and  thus unnamed University campus) and lock them in a  building where  they must occupy their time for  say  6 and half hours- staying out of trouble and sight preferably until they are to start unlocking doors around 5am. They will then work for around 1 1/2 hours unlocking main doors to all the buildings in their zone. Walking around in the dark and twilight armed only with a wad of  keys and such, a "brick" (or rather a 900mhz radio from 1972 about the size on a long  piece of  clay weighing in about the same as that peice of ceramic and about as reliable)  and their wits. No nightstick, no flashlight above a  pen  light, no pepper spray, no mace, and no gun (definitely no guns). About 20  minutes before 7am, the outside smurfs  are expected to make their way back to the station to  turn in the wad of keys and such and clock out for the day. Thus we cover the life of the Outside Smurf or Unarmed Security Guard.

2. Inside Smurf.  This gaurd has multiple shifts he or  in the  extremely rare case she can  work. The Inside Smurf is  assigned to a designated spot on the Campus. We report to the Station but generally don't go to roll call. In fact, most  outside  smurfs don't even realize we inside smurfs exist. Now I will have to quit refering  to us as smurfs since  I porbably passed the legal limits  on smurfing for this post. There  are the  Library Guards, about 6 of us total 2 for day and 2 for evening and 1 for graveyard. Then  there is the UC (university central) Gaurd. The President's house is the president is not in residence Gaurd or the PHITPINRG or as the library guards refer to him, "the Pitpig." He actually is a floating guard who  gets assigned around to watching various properties owned by  the university. He only landed the  President's house which is in one of the more influential  neighborhoods in the  city I am not  naming for fear that the Smurf masters will hunt me down, because the Universities last 4 president's reject the  Southern Manor appeal of the Presidents house  and wanted something non-antebellum instead. The University Museum has its  own guards but as far as I know they aren't smurfs and get paid more than us and dress diferently. In short we don't  associate with  them.

There  is a subspecies of Smurfs here with us, who seldom get mentioned  but when it comes to the University cops they often get bunched in with  us. On official days this subspecies even get to dress like the rest of the smurfs. These are, of  course, the lowest of the  low  in just about  every aspect. I mean they are the University  ticket writers. Students,  faculty and just about everyone else hate them.  I hated them before I became a Smurf. They are underpaid, underworked, underqualified, underpleasant, underhumored, and sly as foxes when  its a car and it can be called into doubt  whether it's supposed to be there  or not.  You can hate  them, you can mock  them  but you do your  best to avoid them. They  lurk around every building, down every street and in some alleys. Yes  I have seen them in the alleys. Truth is they are just unfortunate not to matter enough to the University to even get  paid minimum wage- most of  them  don't even get paid part time. That is until a big event like FOOTBALL comes around. Then they get noticed.

The big equalizer in our line of work  is Sporting events like FOOTBALL. Though  basketball does get some attention but not as much as FOOTBALL. other events that rank are concerts, tractor pulls, truck shows and Wrassling.
yes  Wrassling, you can't live around here and call it wrestling. What  equalizes things for the most part- is that it  is a all hands  on deck activity. Gaurds, Ticket Writers and Cops stand shoulder to shoulder in dealing the waves of  human beings that flood the campus during these events. We don't get paid the same necessarily and we still aren't given guns but we get paid MORE. Even the  University Cops can't strut  much as the  Chief calls in the  locals and staties on  these events. You never know who you may  end up with to work with. It could be school  division, county, city, university or state police. The  only guys who will  not  work  with anyone are  the highway  patrol guys- everyone says  it's because  they are stuck up. But  who  cares, to  me the only  thing that matters is we  Smur- Security guards get a teeny weeny bit more authority  and TIME AND A HALF which  is better than what we usually get.

Also we get the illusion we cops are all on the same team.

There was this guy...

When I first took this crazy job there was this guy working there as a guard, he was like the only guard who was actually going to school and majoring in criminal science or some kind of policing action. The best things about this guy were that he never took the job seriously enough to become the assholes that a lot of guards and cops become. Also he was always level headed and had a good sense of humor, especially to the irony of our situation.
What's more he was my friend. Unfortunately for me I was coming as he was going. I knew him about 4 weeks  in the year before I got the inside job in the stacks. Then he graduated and went out for something like the FBI.
He knew I could write, so one night right before roll call, he turns to me and says these fateful words.
"Hey, when you write the book about all this could you leave my name out of it and promise me that you will call it MY LIFE AS A SMURF?"
"Smurf?"
"Yeah, that is what we are, there is Papa smurf coming in to say his few and i mean very few words of wisdom. Junior smurf who will assume that because papa Smurf has little to say that he can fill in all the gaps, but we will mostly ignore him. We wear blue shirts like the smurfs and black pants.... we for all intents and purposes they might as well be white."
"No caps.."
"Don't interrupt."
"Sorry."
"And" and he raises a very important finger. "And!"
Junior Smurf thinks that this guy wants to ask a question. "WAIT UNTIL ROLL CALL AND BRIEFING" Junior Smurf says -which isn't what we actually call it anyway.
This Guy ignores him and gestures to the self-appointed head guard.
"We have our own Smurfette."
Gracey dutifully blushes and ducks a curtsey, I think shes in love with This Guy. And he's right, we only have at this point one woman crazy enough to be a Guard and an unarmed one at that.
"So what are you going to call the book?" This Guy asks.
"If I write it?"
"When you write it?"
"My life as a smurf."
"And what will you call me?"
"I was thinking of something that rhymes with Woodchuck..."
We all laugh except for Junior Smurf whose name rhymes with woodchuck....

more on sweeping

students at universities resent interruptions. Interruptions are inevitable, the ones that get violent about are interruptions to partying and sex. Snugglers aside and as Hervy would say "Mooky" makers the student who studies a lot is the other one we have to run out of the stacks at night. We guards call these students the study-alls and no I have no idea who came up with the term but it is sacredly passed down from one guard to the next for years and years. I suspect it probably meant something like the student who studies all the time and glares at you when you find them squirreled away in the stacks and then have to herd them out in front of you otherwise they will double back and try to hide and believe me they do. How many times have we had to go back into the stacks at 1 am to find a student who has double backed on us.
Too many times, about 4 times a week on average. Then they get downright hateful (probably cause they are embarrassed at getting caught) and all but stomp their way out of the library since they get a personal escort to the door. When I went to the University you couldn't get me to stay in the library more than a hour so this is a new experience for me.

The last obstacle we sweep for are not even students. its the one thing that eternally plagues all cops and security guards everywhere there is shelter- homeless people. The "Library Hobos" as Sergei calls them or "Book hobos" as Hervy calls them are homeless guys who come in to use the computers (with free internet) in the public areas and get ideas of staying while they are here. They find places to hide/sleep and stash that even the architects of the labyrinthine library never conceived.
We keep an eye on all our homeless and older than average patron and track their movements as best as we can, but every once in a while we have to go root these guys out of broom closets, book elevators or the 40 plus offices scattered throughout the building. Some of the guards have quit over the anxiety this causes since these guys are often filthy and often violent. The procedure is to locate, observe and radio backup (from the University cops) who may or may not show up- largely depends on who is the watch lieutenant that night on how high a priority they consider it to be. So inevitably one of us guards (who if you recall are unarmed) has to sit and watch the homeless person until a cop- usually the screw up cop on the force is sent to handle it. All in all a mess most of the time.
So Hervy and Sergei and the beefier guards will handle the extraction if they believe they can get away with it. And what really gets me about this is that it isn't the Lieutenant they are worried about, it is the Library Admins that do not need to catch wind of it. When they do we get these memos for weeks about the incident plus they call the chief who then has to call us and bitch up a storm for the benefit of the University so that the University Admins thinks he gives a fuck about his job.

Floor sweeping

Floor sweeping is what Hervy my partner calls it. What it sounds like is something the janitors would do, but us it feels cooler than it actually is. We go in opposite directions from the elevators and walk briskly through the stacks checking for human life- yeah I like saying that instead of what Hervy chuckles and says "warm bodies." What that means is all kinds of peeps end up in the stacks and it is our illustrious job to pick them up and sweep them off the floor and escort them to the elevators and off the floor. It's like herding cattle, you run off the masses and then hunt for strays, rope them in and funnel them down the stairways.

The most common stack denizen at 11pm at night is the "Chinese kid," he usually is not Chinese but could be any one of a number of races from the Asian continent. What identifies him, to us. Is he is usually asleep in a couch or cubicle and looks like he has been there all day. Notice I said he and not her. They are always boys although there are occasionally girls in tow. The Chinese guys (yeah we have no idea except they look oriental and could be anything) are always the same 50 or so regulars that litter the six floors of the University stacks. You find them in corners and nooks, just about anyplace where there is enough space for them to put their heads down.
Hervy says that as far as he knows the Chinese Kids basically live in the stacks and only leave to go back to the dorm to shower, or go to class.

The next common denizen is the couples. they pretend to be study partners but we know what they are. At first I wanted to catch them in the act but let me tell you it gets messy and smelly. Sex and heavy petting sounds good in the abstract but when you have to extract them from one another and sort out hastily discarded clothing, condoms and sweaty bodies it gets marginally disgusting. But when you catch the smell generated by these activities that is when you are glad to let them know you are coming and not the other way around...

A beginning

My Life as a Smurf.

            “The people come and go, this way and that; all passing through my panoramic view of the world. My job is forced voyeurism, non-participant always expectant. I sit within hearing of this world’s footfalls of the pedestrian traffic, the clicking heels on the marble amidst the rustle of clothing in friction. I am yet isolated to their nervous smiles from the women as they notice me and the stares of the men who happen to look in my direction. They don’t want me here but are secretly grateful I am.

            Almost no one talks to me except for civility’s sake or for directions to classes, study rooms, bathrooms and elevators. Most simply offer a polite nod, a forced smile or some stupid attempt to show off that they don’t fear me. They fear what I represent. Observing this they skirt my area, not knowing what to say. I let them slip by not knowing how to reply to what they would say. They are almost always surprised to see this sign of acceptance and intelligence as I am dumbfounded by their lack thereof.”

                                                                                                Michael van Dudekof

                                                                                                Library Security Guard.

            We sit there at the desk in the entrance hall of the monumental main floor of the university library. We are the boys in blue, the unarmed security guards, with our clip on ties and big name tags that identify us as such. We sit and observe all the day long only holding conversations among ourselves, our radio bricks on our belts popping with occasional static. A pen in a pallid blue uniform shirt nestled next to a notepad that contains our police call cheat sheet. We have police belts for our radio and small regulation flashlights instead of the billy club flashlights the real cops are expected to have. A pager for the circulation desk rests beside the flashlight. Our black pants scratchy and our black sneakers dull.          

            The desk is our shield against the students and homeless vagrants who come wandering in and out. Its broad wood surface contains a couple of newspapers, a report book, and a telephone that is supposed to be kept inside a locked drawer in the desk.

The library staff hate the desk, one day they will get rid of it and probably make us stand but for now we guards can hide behind its wall from this weird world.

            Today is Thursday, nothing special, save that it is the end of the week for us, the last night that the library stays open all night. Tonight is when we get the freaks and weirdo’s jumping out of every one of the racks. Tonight is when the desperate lovers want to make mooky in the study cubicles and the perverts go hunting late night sleepers and bring optical zoom lens cameras to catch a quickie of the women’s dorm across the way. I am with the pervs on that last one sometimes it is quite entertaining to remind the young woman that striping in front of dorm windows without blinds is unwise. We flash our torches at them and they shriek when it dawns on them where we are.

            What gets me is that the library admins hate us but cannot live without us. They give us no respect and take every opportunity to boss us around and tell us what we are not supposed to do all day long. Night-shift is the only time for us to relax into our jobs and not have to look over our shoulders. Night shift we get call our own shots and go where we like- not that we don’t anyway but we don’t have to look like we aren’t trying on the late shift.