That time I was a security guard
Terrible jobs I used to have - part 6
During my second year at University I found myself a little short of money. This situation had arisen because I had exchanged all of my money for beer over a prolonged period, and found myself at the start of 1993 needing to get a part-time job. Never one to do things by half, I found myself two – an early-morning bakery job, making sandwiches from 5am to 8am, and an evening job as a security job at the Students Union, the centre of Uni life and (certainly at the time) the largest bar in the city.
The bakery work was probably something that would be described as mindful today – easy, repetitive work that required the minimum of brain power. Which was just as well, as no student is at their best at 5am, whether they’ve just woken up or have pushed on till dawn. Luckily, it was just ‘apply filling to bread, cut bread, put in plastic container, seal container’.
Others were working in other parts of the bakery, so conversation was limited, but the radio was on and the shift was short. Easy money.
At the other end of the day was the security work – as usual, not something I had previously considered doing, but the opportunity had presented itself. Myself and several friends had been doing Karate lessons for a couple of years, and because the karate instructor had also got the contract to provide security guards for the Union, he would choose his acolytes to be human shields for armies of drunken students, and count the money from a safe distance.
I should explain at this point what a poor choice I was for a security guard. At 5 foot 7 and under 11 stone, I was definitely built for running away from large drunkards rather than removing them from buildings or doorways. The karate was more a hindrance than a help as it put the seed of optimism in my mind that just maybe I could handle myself after all, rather than doing the sensible thing and Always Running Away.
But a job was a job, and it was good pay for what basically involved standing by the entrance for most of the evening with your arms folded, wearing a nice sweatshirt and frowning occasionally. Even I can do that, and hopefully I wouldn’t get beaten to a bloody pulp too many times.
Sometimes we would provide security for the concerts that took place within the Union building, which included a quite decent gig venue that managed to attract some surprisingly good early-90s indie and rock acts. So I found myself not quite believing my luck while supervising gigs by Terrorvision, The Mock Turtles and even Blur.
The only real jeopardy ever came in the last half hour of the evening, when last orders had been called and time came to gradually remove a thousand drunk young people from the building, emptying them on to the weary streets of the city. The vast majority of students were benign and would flow like lava towards the various exits, occasionally falling over and/or vomiting but mostly seeping into the dark streets where they firmly became Someone Else’s Problem.
A handful of students, always blokes, could become more troublesome, and this was where you earned your money. There were only a couple of scenarios – the person in question was too incapacitated to leave, or just didn’t want to leave, or a fight was breaking out.
The first of these was easy to handle – a few of us would pick up a limb or two each and hoist them out onto the steps where they could enjoy the benefits of the fresh evening air and/or the cooling gutter. Usually their embarrassed friends were happy to help, not wanting to miss a moment of what would keep them in mockery for weeks to come.
Refusals to leave were a bit more of a bother, and I had two tactics for this situation. The first was to point at one of my much larger friends and say ‘look mate, you can either leave when I ask you to, or when he asks you to’. This was surprisingly effective and leant heavily on the inherent laziness of most students, especially those with a few beers inside them and after bedtime.
Dealing with a small person is clearly the path of least resistance and therefore the one most often taken. It occasionally needed a plaintive reminder that I was just doing my job, but usually worked. Some grunting, a little swearing, but they would almost always just go.
The second tactic was to just brazen it out, on the basis that the Head of Security had put me in a Security job, so he must know something the drunks don’t, right? If this guy’s that small, and working security, he must be really handy. It was a terrifying tightrope to walk, a frail tower of bluff and lies that would be exposed forever if just one medium-sized student were to decide he fancied his chances.
But incredibly, it never happened. Only one person ever just straight went for me (funnily enough, a future England rugby international) and he was set upon by a dozen colleagues so quickly and comprehensively that I barely had time to register what had happened. Safety in numbers.
A premise I’ve carried with me since then to this day, in dealing with aggressive situations, is that it has to be binary – you either face someone down with 100% conviction, or you run away as fast as you can. There is nothing useful in between (and to be clear, I will choose option B at least nine times out of ten, dental work is far too expensive at my age).
And with hindsight, it was a fairly middle-class variety of peril – there were no guns, knives or machetes. No bats or knuckledusters. Just students that couldn’t handle their ale and who, more than likely, would feel thoroughly embarrassed the following morning.
The great thing about dealing with very drunk people is that they almost never remember your face if you encounter them the following week, in a shop or lecture. So even if things got unpleasant, I was almost guaranteed to be able to remain in obscurity in my alter ego as normal student.
This city, like many others with a large student population, had a clear ‘channel’ that students were encouraged to remain within – student-friendly bars, clubs, venues and so on, such that you would never need to leave and venture into the real city, where normal people with jobs resided. A combination of heavy student discounts and word-of-mouth recommendations meant this generally worked.
We would occasionally go out looking for a ‘real’ pub, frequented by real people, but didn’t always get the welcome we were hoping for. At that time our pub radars weren’t attuned to the pubs you just shouldn’t go into, and on several occasions we would burst in, beaming, to a local hostelry to find the locals pausing their conversations to glare doorwards, the pool balls suspended mid-journey and the darts stopping in mid-air. We would either take the hint and turn on our heels, or maybe stay for one swift and awkward pint before returning, chastened, to the bright lights of the student pub.
It didn’t take too many weeks of early sandwich making and late night life-imperilling before I concluded that simply spending less money on beer would be a far more effective way of balancing the books. And while seeing when sober what a state people were in when drunk and being removed from the Union was not enough to turn me off the beer, it did make me tone it down, slightly, just for a while.
And with this experience came another couple of career paths that I could safely cross off my future list of possible ambitions. ‘Bouncer’ joined the pile, along with sandwich-maker, dishwasher, stripper booker, care assistant, factory worker and warehouse operative.
Verdict: Not for me. I don’t mind doing terrible jobs but I don’t want actual peril involved. Some people are meant to be in an office, not a doorway.