oh rent-a-cop, where art thou?

and so my life as a certified security guard with the state of Arizona begins thus....

i had received a phone call from the company i now work mere hours after leaving my resume online....i was excited by this quick turn around having be really skeptical about people actually receiving my resume... and it not actually being some sort of joke site that promised jobs but instead was run by someone who just got his jollies out of teasing poor unemployed saps....so i waited a bit to see if the other things i applied for would pan out....and actually i did get several calls, the only problem is that they all wanted me to work 8-5 everyday...

and just so you know...even when i had a full time job....it was at a newspaper and was never 8-5...i generally regard 8 am as a good time to still be sleeping as i am usually and naturally up until 3 am.....

so i decided after about a week and some time having tiny panic attacks that i should check into this security gig....little did i realize that when one calls this company, expresses interest, and brings by a resume and fills out an application...you are in fact hired upon strolling into the building....no questions, no interview....just a thanks, a handshake, and a be back in two days for training......great....and frightening....

so wednesday arrives and i'm in the office for "training"...so i was mentally preparing myself for videos, paper work and lots of role playing...lets face it...i work for the reading cult and also have had tons of volunteer training in my life between stuff i did in high school and undergrad and now as a happy participant in queerland....i was also slightly afraid that there could be some sort of obsticle course involved.....but i really wasn't prepared for what the day would actually hold

picture it....sicily...1932......no...picture it...a small conference room.....a table, chairs, tiny tv/vcr unit, stack of videos, folders of paperwork...and vacuum cleaners.....not just uprights but also those huge units that are built into walls so all you do is hook up a hose from room to room.....basically there is enough room for 5 people to conference...uncomfortably...and enough vacuum cleaners for us to have one for each hand....perhaps we will be role playing with vacuums?

so i take my seat, and across from me are the two single most unhappy looking people i have seen in a long time...my mother included.....there is a woman, mid 50s i'd guess, salt-n-pepper hair, longer grown mullet, flannel plaid shirt, jeans, boots....immediately i thought oh good i'm not the only queer person in the room (this will prove to be incorrect a bit later)...and she's scowling and staring at the table as if it has just insulted her haircut.....and this tall, slight, white boy...like 17 i think...he hasn't even accomplished facial fuzz yet let alone hair......is curled into that grey office chair like it's a lifeboat and has pushed himself as far away from the woman as he can get without french kissing the nearest vacuum cleaner...

i sit...i smile...at no one...and we wait in awkward silence until jim comes into the room....now jim is a friendly older guy who used to be with the tucson police department...and he's our trainer for the day....which means that his job will actually consist of changing out video tapes, asking us if we have question, taking our tax forms when we are done filling them out, and filling in the gaps for us when the sound craps out on the vcr....so without....well any ado...the baradge of video tape watching begins.....

these tapes were nothing short of AMAZING.....and i mean that in an utterly mindblowing sort of way.....these things were from the late 70s and early 80s....jim at one point tried to claim that they were but 6 or 7 years old...but i know better...the kid across from me wasn't even born when these tapes were well into use.....and these tapes were all the training that we were getting....forget role playing and obsticle courses....these tapes were sure to enlighten us in the most useful of ways.....well....they were certainly enlightening.....

the first tape was all about our responsibility as a guard...which included a 10 minute segment on the importance of being clean and neat since people expect rent-a-cops, jim's term here not mine, to be slovenly because we've been given a bad rap in the media....so everyone please remember to wash your uniform especially if you get katsup on the front of your shirt, tuck in said shirt, remember your lovely trucker security hat and wear nice, polished shoes.....

this tape also included some important hints about how to act while on the job again since security guards have gotten such bad reps because of the media....personally the ones i recall seeing on tv generally just wind up getting killed because they didn't have a gun, but maybe that's just limited tv intake on my part.....these hints included things that were obviously aimed at straight white men.....like for instance...the raspy narrator's voice says "don't gawk at the oposite sex while on duty"....as they show a bunch of pudgy white dudes in uniform oggling some young woman in red short shorts.....i couldn't help but notice that camera spent a lot of time on the girl's butt and much less time on the guards...hmm....

then there was the tape of common sense things (and i recognize that this might not be common sense for the average caveman) like for instance.....always be nice....you are there to help not harm people....and when guarding a closed area of a building that people want to cut through, be sure and be polite no matter how agitated they may become....don't do things like raise your fists or giant mag light in a confrontational posture....and don't base your helping someone on personal prejudices...again don't help the pretty blonde girl in red short shorts while ignoring the old lady in the wheel chair....

and then there was the legal issues video...my personal favorite...and also the one that jim had to translate in spots for us due to crappy sound...this video included actual helpful advice like..if you are in a guard booth and you send someone away from a gated community who you know is intoxicated, call the police because you can be held responsible for letting that person drive away while impared.......

but it also included senarios about being a bad mall or hospital cop (note our company doesn't even do those types of contracts) and also about how to behave properly while conducting searches of people (also something we don't do)...the explaination of how to do a good search verses a bad search was so amazing that i must share it

so imagine the way that this video has been functioning up to this point....there is a young woman with bad bad frizzy 80s hair in a madonna-esque business suit explaining the finer points of the law involved in the scenerios being presented....and so she says "now we will look at proper and improper conduct when searching the contents of someone's purse or bag"...the video cuts to a scene of a sloppily dressed white male guard at a search post.....a young attractive woman (i swear it's that same gal with the short shorts) walks up in a purple dress carrying a HUGE black leather purse....the guard askes to search it and then begins pulling stuff out of it..he retreives a large video tape case and pops it open.....and then he says..."well well....triple x.....if you are into that sort of thing then maybe i should just take you on back to the office, pop in this tape, and innitiate a strip search" leer leer evil laugh evil laugh...........the video cuts away from this scene and back to our fair narrator....and she says "obvously this is an example of unexceptable behavior".....obviously this is the understatement of the year........

the last tape was attempting to explain to us how to fill out a guard report...which consists of if you see it and it looks suspicious you should write it down...and do it in a way that makes sense....seems reasonable to me...but it crapped out after 10 minutes...and yes that explaination actually took that long....

and then they sent us off to lunch.........

when we return, we are fingerprinted....and this is where my life gets a touch more interesting than i wanted it to.....there are moments in every transperson's life where the checking of a certian set of boxes can cause some distress.....generally up until recently i would answer honestly based on how the question was asked.....gender: obviously i'm not lying if i say male...because of course the entire world recognizes that sex and gender are NOT the same thing....and sex: again i try to be honest and say...not for quite some time........but this particular day, i had to address these boxes on a fingerprint card that was being sent to the state as part of my background check....so i left it blank thinking i could just skip past it...but jim decided to check our cards as we were handing them in and immediately noticed that it was blank....and so now i am faced with should i be honest (and when i say that i mean answer that question in terms of do i have a dick or do i not)...and have him question it in front of said unhappy fellow trainees or lie and hope the state figures it out?......

well of course i checked male.....because that's what he saw when he looked at me...and that's who i am....even if my birth certificate claims otherwise....and so on the form that went with it, there was this stupid question that i'm starting to see more and more (thank you fucking bush administration) about what other names have you worked under...and so i wrote my given name (really small) and noted it legally changed as of its date and prayed for the best....

well obviously either the state figured it out...or missed it alltogether....since there's a more of this story to tell....