Today we are going to address everyone's dying question, what do night shift security guards ACTUALLY do.

Our security truck is a Honda Ridgeline, really top of the line when it comes to security equipment. It comes custom fit with several large dents, fading paint, and a broken back bumper. The tactical rust spots help us catch the people parking in the wrong spaces.

It also has some fun features like when you honk, every single siren and light comes on, this is for covertness. Then, when you go to open a car door, 50% of the time the alarm goes off. When this happens people think you're really good at your job. Possibly my favorite perk of the truck is that when you unlock the car with the key, all of the windows simultaneously roll down.

Security gets the nicest equipment.

We rotate shifts in 4 to 8-hour increments, and usually only one guard is on duty. Everyone has a different style, some guards feel their style is running into things. This is always evident by the mysterious dents that appear all over the vehicle. We are highly trained individuals.

In reality, I am in the U.S. Navy, so when I went to look for a part-time job last year, campus security seemed like a pretty good fit. Most of the time is spent patrolling the 100-acre college campus we work on. We also are responsible for unlocking and locking buildings. This is actually most of our jobs. We have one of those giant key rings with about 25 keys on it. We carry an emergency phone, radio, OC Spray, handcuffs, and a flashlight.

For training, we had to get OC sprayed, which is really fun if you enjoy the feeling of your face melting.

Story Time

A few years back we had a much nice Honda Ridgeline. It was brand new, and spotless. The campus is in a bad part of town respectively, which means we get a lot of thieves trying to steal bikes or cars. This makes the security job a little more fun than just sitting in a car watching the hours pass. A former guard was on shift one morning, when he caught a thief trying to steal a bike. He was in the new truck at the time, and quickly flashed his lights to get the thief to stop. Instead, the bike thief took off on the bike and the guard on duty was led on a chase. Long story short, this chase ran all over campus and resulted in the thief getting away and a flipped, totaled, truck. To put the cherry on top of that story of excellence, the guard who flipped the truck assumed he was getting fired anyway, so he abandoned the truck in a field on campus and went to breakfast. Again, I want to stress that we are highly trained individuals.

Fin

Here's a picture of me to prove that I'm actually a security guard. If you look closely you can see that my face is actually exuding pride and excitement.

Other Story Time

I have two stories I tell everyone when they ask the most exciting things that have ever happened to me on shifts. I'll save one for another time, but here is the most exciting in my opinion. This story begins when a hot water pipe burst in a dorm, collapsed the ceiling, filled the building with a thick steam, set off the fire alarm, and flooded the building in ankle deep boiling water. I got a call on our duty phone saying the building was flooding, which was a little unexpected considering nothing EVER happens on shifts. I arrive at the building to see all of the residents outside. Everything seemed normal. I walked into the building and couldn't see but a few feet in front of me due to the steam. The fire department arrived from the alarms being triggered, and I was trying to talk to a maintenance guy on the phone to figure out how in the world to shut off the water. That's easier said than done when you have a fire alarm going off, you feel like you are in hell's swamp, and there's rising water covering your ankles. This is what my training prepared me for. It was really exciting, and I got this epic picture from right after the chaos subsided.

We got everything under control and then the school brought in cleaning crews to fix all the damage. End other story.

Alright, so to actually get to the point of this post, do I actually just sit around and drink coffee and donuts? Well, I do that a lot, yes. As guards we work with the officers on campus, and there was a time that 4 different guards and officers brought donuts and coffee for everyone else not knowing the others were bringing coffee and donuts. Stereotypical police officers and security guards are what we are.

However, the job is a lot more than coffee and donuts.

From locking buildings, responding to emergency calls, patrolling campus, writing tickets, we tend to stay pretty busy.

There are of course shifts that you end up with the view in the image below for 4 hours.

While there are slow times, working security is actually rather fun. Getting to interact with police and firefighters on a weekly basis as well as having the ability to pepper spray and handcuff someone is pretty awesome. You may be surprised, but since security guards aren't officers of the law, they actually have the ability to detain you on private property without cause for arrest. The officers would have to have cause, but security guards can operate on suspicion. That falls in a little bit of a gray area of private property security law.

Hopefully, this story gave you some humor and an inside look into what a security guard does every day. I am probably going to share some more stories of my work as a guard in the future, so be sure to follow me if you want to stay up to date.

If you want to check out another post where I shared some amazing photos I took while on duty, you can check that out here.