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.