Sooooo... work today. Evidently, threat of arrest is an occupational hazard around here. I heard a pounding on the door and some yelling, so I answered it. There was a uniformed private security officer. "Hello," I said to him. "SECURITY!! Put your hands up!" he yelled at me. "What?" "Get your hands where I can see them!" he barked. "Show me some identification!" I calmly handed him my driver's license. "What's going on here," I asked. "I'm kind of working right now." "Is this your real address?" "No, I moved recently. Is there a reason for this?"

Obviously, there was little that would be accomplished from this conversation. "This building is alarmed. What are you doing here?" "Working," I repeated. "I work here and I'm on the clock right now." "Can't you hear the alarm?" he grunted. "What alarm? I didn't know we had one. Do you mean that buzzing?" I asked him. Now that I was standing in the vestibule, there was a faint whine. Coming from next door. "The Urbandale police will be here in a minute," he threatened. "Okay," I responded.

Perhaps the police would make more sense than this unarmed, glorified mall cop. I was most definitely where I was supposed to be and had many logs and schedules that attested to this fact. Idle threats really weren't going to do much to me today. "You need to turn this alarm off. Enter the access code." I looked at the featureless card reader next to the door to the jeweler's in the next suite over. There was certainly no means of entering any 'code,' even if I knew how to get into the place. "Look, I'm actually supposed to be here. How about you talk to the engineer and maybe he can give you the 'access code,'" I offered.

I let the suspicious officer into the station and called the engineer. "Hi, this is Aaron. Sorry to bother you, but this guy says he'll have the police arrest me if I don't give him some sort of code to an alarm or something. Can you talk to him?" I asked the chief engineer. I have no idea what was said to make Chumpy McChuckles go away, but the engineer did something I'm thankful for. The clown wandered away to his official-looking car. I'm going to place a call to the building owners about their security tomorrow.

Comments

forcedperfect
Sun, 12/11/2005 - 23:06
rent-a-chumps
man, the only thing better than REAL authority figures are the dubious kind. sooooo much fun.