The Ryno Pen

Some of my earlier posts tell of the wicked ways of cleaners. I made a mental note to tell about the security guards: okay, it’s time for another bunch of lies and calumnies…
There’s probably a whole book in the dealings of these human adjuncts to the (more reliable, and in some cases more personable) motion detector, and some incidents probably shouldn’t pass without mention.

Canberra is known as The Bush Capital for a reason. One complex, close to the airport, is pretty-well surrounded by a steep area of national park (often full of kangaroos), and bordering a sheep farm in the airport buffer zone. Your humble blogonaut is informed (fairly reliably) that one particularly bored shift of blue-hats found a few stray sheep wandering near the foyer, and shooed them inside.

Having herded the half-dozen merinos into the lifts and pushed buttons at random, the pranksters waited for midnight shift changeover, at which time the outgoing officers mentioned how “spooky” the place had been that evening.

Sure enough, motion detectors were activating all over what should have been a deserted building.

I’m also told it was a damn sight harder to get the beasts out and remove all those little spheroids of evidence.

Sure, a significant proportion of these chaps (who were then a subset of Federal Police) made long-distance calls, “borrowed” coffee and biscuits, signed-on and spent the shift patrolling horizontally from a quiet staff sick-bay, and all the other little foibles. Quis custodiet, and all that, indeed!

I don’t know how it is these days, but back when Canberra was basically a GovCo company town, it was the Tit From Which All Available Goodness Was Sucked. Kiddies used schoolbooks with the Broad Arrow, Roo-and-Emu, or whatever was the current GovCo logo, on the front, to write with their GovCo pens, and the only significant market for office supplies was the Government.

From what happened to our stocks of soap and toilet paper from the cleaners’ storeroom, I reckon the taxpayer subsidised a fair amount of the home ablutions and excretions of the blue-hats, too.

There was this one funny little outpost, where I happened to be working my legitimate, daytime job at the time this took place. Twenty-four hour blue-hat guard, boom gates and all the hush-hush stuff, and a mix of private contractors, guvvie workers, and People In Uniform (some of whom were Furriners) milling here and there, doing furtive things.

That place was where I learned to drink black coffee. If any milk was left, it stood a fairly good chance of being stale, or having been raised to a set of unhygienic lips and drained of a hefty draught before returning to the fridge. I was working on one of those extracurricular projects I seem to come up with when bored (basically a database utility that did most of my fortnightly cycle of work in about 30 minutes of overnight batch job), so I was finishing late and generally first in. (See, that’s how you, too, can wind up burned-out at fifty!)

My milk still managed to vanish. I wasn’t alone. Cookies, sweets, leftovers in the fridge, all were being abducted.

Worse yet, change from desk drawers started to go. One of the guys was saving dollar coins (then a relative novelty) with the idea of sticking a bunch to his wife’s birthday card: his jar, with over thirty bucks in it, was ratted.

I was talking with this particular chap in the lunch room. We came up with a plan, and kept it to ourselves.

A little cooking, and my colleague came up with a nice plate of cookies with big crunchy sugar crystals on top. Only that wasn’t sugar. They looked good enough to leave in a cookie jar on my friend’s desk, so we did.

A coin jar went into my desk. It was painted in early Kindergarten Primitive, like one’s kids might do for their dad in a craft lesson. Though opaque, it held the jingly promise of spare change. And more.

I’d taken to marking my milk as POISON or BIOHAZARD after the “I SPAT IN THIS” label was appended “SO DID I, MATE“. This time, I added a hefty whack of imitation peppermint essence.

Next morning, bright and early, I fronted the security desk and showed my pass to the guard known as Mouldy Cardigan.

Sniff, sniff… I couldn’t be sure over the usual fug of the year-round, always-worn cardigan. He did look a little dry and cracked round the corners of the mouth, though.

It was when Mouldy stiffly shuffled the key register from under the desk with his stiffened wrists and the backs of his hands that I asked him, in a fairly threatening tone, whether he had considered transferring to another post.

Some dark deeds can’t stand the light of day.