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Old 12-02-2012, 09:35 PM   #2
Icelander
 
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Re: Help with night guard

I've been a hotel desk night concierge (eight pm to eight am), a night watchman on a fishing trawler while it was in port (from 6 pm to 8 am) and a security guard at the Central Bank of Iceland (my shifts were usually eight am to four pm or four pm to midnight, the midnight to eight shift I did only a couple of times).

The overwhelming impression of my duties in those jobs was... none. I needed to physically be there, that was about it.

At the hotel, I read the complete works of Lovecraft, did a lot of gaming work and surfed the Web extensively. I also glanced occasionally at security monitors and was supposed to take a walk around the hotel a couple of times over the night (but rarely did). There were occasional guests in the evening, asking about restaurants, arranging wakeup calls and pickups, etc., but all that died down after midnight.

In fact, the night desk had so little to do that a hardnosed middle-manager of the cleaning staff had successfully convinced the upper managment to make us do a couple of machines of laundry and to lay out the morning buffet before we left, just so we had to do something for our wages.

As a watchman on the trawler, I walked rounds to see if someone was trying to break in or if some equipment might be malfunctioning and I responded to alarms from the engine room. If it was something I could not deal with and which could not wait until morning, I summoned an engineer.

What I actually did was read, watch movies and, once I learned that no one really minded, invite my friends over to the rec area of the trawler for game night, movie night and once, memorably, to watch the first game of the day during a football World Cup (while it was in Asia, the first game was on very, very early in the morning here). The morning game ran into the start of the workday on the ship, so the friend in question, a young girl, had to walk out with me past a bunch of sailors, which, as you can imagine, occasioned ribald commentary.

As a security guard, I alternated between monitor duty, walking rounds and periods of... little at all, really. I also locked up for the night, checked that stuff that was supposed to be off was actually turned off and whether stuff that was meant to be on was on and suchlike, but that was only about two hours of the eight. While walking rounds, you checked in to the monitor room with your radio, occasionally, reporting where you were, and in the monitor room, you received those calls.

During the slack periods, I surfed the Net, prepared gaming sessions, wrote historical fiction designed to amuse only myself*, planned how to rob the bank**, tried to explain to middle-aged security guards what 'gaming' was and had long, pointless conversations with friends over the phone.

Any specific questions?

*A process which I call authorial masturbation and I wish that more 'artists' would have the decency to throw their creations in the wastebaskets once they've had their fun, rather than publish them.
**Eventually, I shelved the plan for coming out worse in a risk-benefit analysis than just getting a law degree and a job.
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