During the past week, we have had two known occasions of security guards nodding off on duty. No,
this is not just sitting at the security post with closed eyes for a power nap, but consciously preferring
horizantality to perpendicularity when they were required to take care of our lives and possessions.
These offending men took the avatar of Sri Ranganathar, with a slightly modified posture (the heaving belly facing up, lifeless arms akimbo), snoring away in the hope that they would frighten the black-and-white dog at least when they were asleep. And they were nowhere near their security posts, but snug inside a room to which they had retired for this exercise!! I am sure all this sounds very familiar to a lot of us, who have lived in independent houses elsewhere, because security men, as a tribe, are wont to do such things for the entertainment of their employers!
One of the nice things about reaching a particular level in the hierarchy of big corporations, especially
the ones which wake up and smell the money every morning in multiple countries across the globe,
is that you are almost forced by your company and peers (not many people need this external force, though) to look for large, independent houses to live in. What that type of accommodation invariably comes with, is the burden of your own posse of security men. At a minimum, one had 3 guys, going through 8-hour shifts each, covering the day/night routine. Apart from making you feel highly insecure (after reducing your company's profit somewhat), these chaps invariably were the continuous sources of entertainment with their `professional' antics. Here are a couple of vignettes from my own experience:
-- In Madras during the early 90s, we had the usual quota of security men for our house. We had just moved into the house and my parents were with me at that time. My father, being a Gandhian and strict disciplinarian, frowned upon all the excesses of life and this concept of hiring one's own security to guard one's possessions (which were anyway overwhelmingly superfluous beyond 3 dhotis, 3 jibbas, underwear and a pair of chappals-if you insist!) got his goat. He tried to persuade me that such outrageous display of whatever does not behove us but '4 out of the 5 houses in that very small area had security guards and how can I be beneath them' was my sound argument, which obviously did not impress him. Distressed though my father was, he realised the latest appendage to our lives is for the long term. He is the kind who sleeps early, so he never had the occasion to shake hands with the night duty security guard for a brief period. One day we returned from some function late in the night and my father immediately seized the opportunity, finding the guard fast asleep. He clanged the gate with extra vigour to wake him up. Next day began my ordeal. My father decided to keep a vigil on the security guard in the night!! He used the alarm to wake up 3 times between 11 pm and 4 am to record in a notebook, the times during which he found the security guard asleep. His nocturnal movements were of greater disturbance to us (because he woke most of the others up during his sorties, unlike the guard who slumbered nicely without causing any inconvenience to us!). My secretary and the office administration guys were kept busy during the next month when we changed security personnel 8 times, when it dawned on all of us that there was an inherent contradiction in the expectation that a night guard should be awake to do his job! This rigmarole continued - the new guard slept and Appa played the `watcher's' role perfectly. Then Appa ratcheted up his activity to the next level, he started waking me up to present irrefutable, ocular proof. He would knock on our bedroom door, purr at 1 am `come and see this' and sleep-walk me to the window downstairs. From there he would gleefully point to the guard who was
sprawled in some part of the portico! Soon, all the inhabitants of the house were up in the night frequently and taking turns to document the misdemeanours of the guard, under the able stewardship of my father. It took about a month for me to wonder why we needed security guards in the night, if all of us are going to be awake anyway! So, my father won and I lost but at least, we all got to sleep after that.
-- One of the guards my father spied upon, was told by his office to go around the house in the night, tapping the danda on the floor, so that the noise could be heard. My father was a bit disappointed about this development, because he thought people had found a solution to keep the guard awake. He need not have worried. This guard, ingenious as he was, developed a habit of sleeping, while his hand involuntarily moved once in 5 minutes to knock on the ground and produce the necessary sound to delude the household. But, he also got snared eventually by the ever-watchful super sleuth of our home!!
-- In Jakarta, Indonesia, we had a slightly different kind of experience. The guard on night duty got changed for some reason and the incoming worthy was a sprightly, good looking, young man who wanted to play the field. He boasted that he is a specialist in doing night shifts and explained he studied a bit during the day. We never figured out about the day part, but in the night he wooed the maids in the various houses around ours. He was probably the only guard I saw fully awake during most nights, but he had his incentives and reasons. Before I could muster the wits to tell the Security Agency to change him, another neighbour who had the same agency did the complaining and the guy was shunted out, much to the chagrin of the adoring maids. Here was one guard who was willing to remain awake and we would not let him be!!
-- Another of our Jakarta guards was a slip of a man, all of 5 ft, waist size 28 or 30, about 50 kilos - a description that defies the logic of his being hired as a guard. But there he was; and he was such a good soul that even if people were not impressed with his phyiscal attributes, he was a huge hit in the household as well as neighbourhood. A do-gooder, generally. He had no family, so the maid took him under her wings and fed him most of the times from the house, which we did not mind at all. The hilarious part was, after about 2 months, he was cleaning the maid's room, washing all our vessels, cleaning the kitchen and doing all assorted duties, while our maid (a woman, more sizable in all respects than the guard himself) was sitting at the gate as the guard. That was a reasonably beneficial swap, we thought!!
Well, we will continue to look for that elusive guard, who does his night duty diligently and does not sleep. But, I feel we are chasing a vision, the veritable chimera!! Unless we select only those guys who are suffering from insomnia and test their efficiency levels, we may never find our hero!!
this is not just sitting at the security post with closed eyes for a power nap, but consciously preferring
horizantality to perpendicularity when they were required to take care of our lives and possessions.
These offending men took the avatar of Sri Ranganathar, with a slightly modified posture (the heaving belly facing up, lifeless arms akimbo), snoring away in the hope that they would frighten the black-and-white dog at least when they were asleep. And they were nowhere near their security posts, but snug inside a room to which they had retired for this exercise!! I am sure all this sounds very familiar to a lot of us, who have lived in independent houses elsewhere, because security men, as a tribe, are wont to do such things for the entertainment of their employers!
One of the nice things about reaching a particular level in the hierarchy of big corporations, especially
the ones which wake up and smell the money every morning in multiple countries across the globe,
is that you are almost forced by your company and peers (not many people need this external force, though) to look for large, independent houses to live in. What that type of accommodation invariably comes with, is the burden of your own posse of security men. At a minimum, one had 3 guys, going through 8-hour shifts each, covering the day/night routine. Apart from making you feel highly insecure (after reducing your company's profit somewhat), these chaps invariably were the continuous sources of entertainment with their `professional' antics. Here are a couple of vignettes from my own experience:
-- In Madras during the early 90s, we had the usual quota of security men for our house. We had just moved into the house and my parents were with me at that time. My father, being a Gandhian and strict disciplinarian, frowned upon all the excesses of life and this concept of hiring one's own security to guard one's possessions (which were anyway overwhelmingly superfluous beyond 3 dhotis, 3 jibbas, underwear and a pair of chappals-if you insist!) got his goat. He tried to persuade me that such outrageous display of whatever does not behove us but '4 out of the 5 houses in that very small area had security guards and how can I be beneath them' was my sound argument, which obviously did not impress him. Distressed though my father was, he realised the latest appendage to our lives is for the long term. He is the kind who sleeps early, so he never had the occasion to shake hands with the night duty security guard for a brief period. One day we returned from some function late in the night and my father immediately seized the opportunity, finding the guard fast asleep. He clanged the gate with extra vigour to wake him up. Next day began my ordeal. My father decided to keep a vigil on the security guard in the night!! He used the alarm to wake up 3 times between 11 pm and 4 am to record in a notebook, the times during which he found the security guard asleep. His nocturnal movements were of greater disturbance to us (because he woke most of the others up during his sorties, unlike the guard who slumbered nicely without causing any inconvenience to us!). My secretary and the office administration guys were kept busy during the next month when we changed security personnel 8 times, when it dawned on all of us that there was an inherent contradiction in the expectation that a night guard should be awake to do his job! This rigmarole continued - the new guard slept and Appa played the `watcher's' role perfectly. Then Appa ratcheted up his activity to the next level, he started waking me up to present irrefutable, ocular proof. He would knock on our bedroom door, purr at 1 am `come and see this' and sleep-walk me to the window downstairs. From there he would gleefully point to the guard who was
sprawled in some part of the portico! Soon, all the inhabitants of the house were up in the night frequently and taking turns to document the misdemeanours of the guard, under the able stewardship of my father. It took about a month for me to wonder why we needed security guards in the night, if all of us are going to be awake anyway! So, my father won and I lost but at least, we all got to sleep after that.
-- One of the guards my father spied upon, was told by his office to go around the house in the night, tapping the danda on the floor, so that the noise could be heard. My father was a bit disappointed about this development, because he thought people had found a solution to keep the guard awake. He need not have worried. This guard, ingenious as he was, developed a habit of sleeping, while his hand involuntarily moved once in 5 minutes to knock on the ground and produce the necessary sound to delude the household. But, he also got snared eventually by the ever-watchful super sleuth of our home!!
-- In Jakarta, Indonesia, we had a slightly different kind of experience. The guard on night duty got changed for some reason and the incoming worthy was a sprightly, good looking, young man who wanted to play the field. He boasted that he is a specialist in doing night shifts and explained he studied a bit during the day. We never figured out about the day part, but in the night he wooed the maids in the various houses around ours. He was probably the only guard I saw fully awake during most nights, but he had his incentives and reasons. Before I could muster the wits to tell the Security Agency to change him, another neighbour who had the same agency did the complaining and the guy was shunted out, much to the chagrin of the adoring maids. Here was one guard who was willing to remain awake and we would not let him be!!
-- Another of our Jakarta guards was a slip of a man, all of 5 ft, waist size 28 or 30, about 50 kilos - a description that defies the logic of his being hired as a guard. But there he was; and he was such a good soul that even if people were not impressed with his phyiscal attributes, he was a huge hit in the household as well as neighbourhood. A do-gooder, generally. He had no family, so the maid took him under her wings and fed him most of the times from the house, which we did not mind at all. The hilarious part was, after about 2 months, he was cleaning the maid's room, washing all our vessels, cleaning the kitchen and doing all assorted duties, while our maid (a woman, more sizable in all respects than the guard himself) was sitting at the gate as the guard. That was a reasonably beneficial swap, we thought!!
Well, we will continue to look for that elusive guard, who does his night duty diligently and does not sleep. But, I feel we are chasing a vision, the veritable chimera!! Unless we select only those guys who are suffering from insomnia and test their efficiency levels, we may never find our hero!!
