I work graveyard security at a hotel. I don’t deal with a lot of people, which is great after working in fast food and tourism, and many I do interact with are relatively polite. Some, however, are not.

I am the only one who works on this site at night, so there are no night auditors or supervisors on site. While we have a hot tub and pool, they are closed at night due to not meeting specifications in my state that allow for night swimming; specifically, there is not enough lighting, among other things, leaving it to be quite dark. They are closed from dusk to dawn. It’s my job to enforce the rules, so I do.

Around midnight, I am doing a security round when I hear that the hot tub is running. I turn on my body cam before approaching and note that there are two people in the hot tub. I can see that the one guest who ends up talking to me is a white man in his late sixties who is quite a bit larger than my hundred-pound self. All I see of the other guest is that they have long brown hair.

Me: “Hi, how are you guys doing tonight?”

Guest: “Fine.”

Me: “Are you guys staying here on the property?”

Guest: “Yeah, we’re in [room].”

Me: “Okay, well, I do need you guys to get on out. The hot tub is closed at night.”

Guest: *As he’s getting out* “Well, that’s not what the restaurant staff said! They told us that it was open all night long!”

Internally, I say, “Yeah, that’s a load of crap. The restaurant staff knows it’s closed at night. They’ve kicked people out before I’ve gotten here. They’ve also been closed for two hours now.”

Out loud, I say:

Me: “Well, unfortunately, they were mistaken. If you had asked at the front desk, they would have been able to give you better information.”

Guest: “You know, you should be a lot nicer. We’re paying a lot of money to stay here.”

Me: “Noted.”

I wait while they leave, shut off the jets, and continue my round. About fifteen minutes later, I receive a call on the site phone. Three guesses who it is.

Me: “[Hotel] security.”

Guest: “Is there anyone else I can talk to there?”

Me: “No, sir, I am the only person here.”

Guest: “What about someone higher up?”

Me: “I am the highest authority on site.”

Guest: “Fine, I’ll call tomorrow.” *Hangs up*

Great, a problem guest. I texted my boss about the situation and sent him a copy of the body cam footage.

I promptly forgot the incident until I woke up the next day. My boss had forwarded an email from one of the hotel managers about this guy.

The guest did keep his word and complained, but the exaggerations he made were, frankly, funny. He claimed I had kicked them out because I was racist against biracial couples. (Nope, you just weren’t following the rules.) The hotel manager even stated in his email that he didn’t believe this guy but wanted security to be aware of it.

My boss called the guest personally, at which point he added more things to his initial complaint. He said there were a bunch of people on the pool deck that I didn’t talk to. (One, people are allowed on the pool deck, just not swimming, and two, body cam and security cameras both showed that to be a lie.) He claimed that there were parties going on all night. (We had zero noise complaints, and I have a track record of making sure people stay quiet.) And he claimed that they didn’t feel safe staying there because of me.

My partner is a supervisor in the same security company as I am, and so he showed me the command staff chat the day after this incident. They were all laughing at the ridiculousness of this guy; they had all seen the body cam footage to review my conduct. My favorite line is still, “Racism is when no hot tub,” and I have a habit of randomly saying that for minor inconveniences.

All in all, my boss just told me to fake an apology and play nice if I saw him again. Guess who never showed up for their apology?

I work in security. I arrived at my post today to find a new directive on how to handle packages. Basically, if there’s no name associated with the delivery and none of the three listed managers know anything about it, turn the delivery away at the gate.

“Why has this come about?” you might ask. Well…

A couple of days ago, in a large city in Texas, USA, at 01:45, a man delivered a briefcase to the door guard at a media station. He claimed it was for the newsroom. The guard who accepted the briefcase is a subcontractor of the same national company I work for, and I guard another location of the same media conglomerate in a different state.

Later, the station got a call that it might be a bomb.

As my site supervisor was telling me the story, I was thinking, “Get as much information from the caller as possible. Then, make an overhead page for evacuation, call 911, call the supervisor, and go through the building making sure people are out. Meet the bomb squad, take them to the briefcase, and get the bleep out of there myself.”

This guard in Texas decided to open the briefcase. Yes, really.

Luckily, it wasn’t really a bomb.

The guard has been “reassigned” away from that post and is likely to be fired from the major, national, well-known guard company.

In 2004, my grad school sent me to a conference, along with a couple of other grad students. We were going through security for our return flight when my carry-on bag got flagged for a search. I couldn’t figure out why until the agent opened the bag and pulled out a mini screwdriver set.

Agent: “What’s this?”

Me: “Oh, shoot, sorry about that. It’s a set of small screwdrivers. I was at a conference, and it was a freebie at the vendor fair.”

Agent: “You’re not allowed to bring this on the plane.”

Me: “Yeah, I forgot I had it. That’s okay. It was free anyway. I don’t need to keep it.”

Agent: “Do you need these screwdrivers to fix your glasses?”

Me: “What? No, they were just a giveaway. I don’t really need them at all.”

I actually do wear glasses, but at the time, I was wearing contacts.

Agent: “I’m not sure you understand.” *Starts nodding as he speaks* “Do you need these to fix your glasses?”

His nodding was an obvious signal that he wanted me to say yes.

Me: “Yes?”

Agent: “Then there’s nothing I can do about it.”

He put the screwdriver set back in my bag and zipped it closed.

Agent: “Have a good flight.”

I left the security area, and then I saw that one of my fellow grad students was watching the scene in amazement. He’s Muslim.

Muslim Grad Student: “Dude. That would never happen to me.”

I work security for a music venue, and since I’m one of the older guys, I usually get to roam the floor, but this day was different. I was stationed in the barricade between the crowd and the stage. The crowd started funneling in and filling up the space by the barricade immediately. I noticed that the crowd seemed to be older metal fans, so we didn’t expect it to get too rowdy.

The first act went on and the crowd was headbanging and lightly mosh-pitting along. Well, that didn’t sit well with the singer, so before the last song, he told the crowd to kick it up because security were his friends and they needed to earn their pay. Immediately, a guy crowd surfed to the front. I caught him and let him go.

The singer commented, “That’s what I’m talking about!” and then started their last song.

My coworker and I were almost overrun by crowd surfers, but we kept up until halfway through the song when a crowd surfer with no shirt, slick with sweat, came over and got shifted to the right at the last push of the crowd, and thus, we were out of position to catch him. He proceeded to fall through my coworker’s hands and hit my knee and bend it a little backward. I screamed, fell forward, hit my other knee against the barricade, and fell to the ground. Before my coworkers could help me out of the way, I got my head stepped on by a crowd surfer.

They wanted to try and stand me up, but I made them pull me out to the side. Once I calmed down a little, I noticed my knee didn’t hurt, so I tried to stand, but my right knee wouldn’t hold and I fell back down.

An ambulance was called, and the poor paramedics that showed up couldn’t lift my rather large self onto the gurney. I pulled myself up with the barricade enough to get the gurney under me and was wheeled out of the venue, to the cheers of the crowd. That was the first time I ever had a crowd cheer for me.

I ended up missing a week of work due to a hyperextension/sprain of my right knee, and then I was put on light duty for another week. But the venue changed their policy on crowd surfers to where you can once, but if you are caught again, you are kicked out.

Many moons ago, when I lived in New England, I used to work as an EMT. Long story short, I got burned out, went into security, moved to Florida, got a job as security at the resort I’m at, and moved up to Night Audit. This story happened when I was still working in security.

I am between my rounds, up at the front desk chit-chatting with the Front Desk Agent when the elevator opens and a family bursts forth from the elevator. The father is carrying his son, the mother is hysterical, and the daughter is all “meh” about what is going on. The son is bleeding rather heavily from his foot. The blood is just dumping all over the wood floors.

I direct the Front Desk Agent to get the medical kit from the back and go over to the family. In my “way too calm” EMT voice, I ask what happened, all while going to examine the kid’s foot after they put him on the tiled island in the middle of the room. I know what’s wrong before they tell me, mostly because the shell is protruding from the kid’s foot. Stepping on shells is an extremely common problem here. Sandals were invented for a reason.

I radio PBX and tell them to call 911 for a shell impaled in a child’s foot and to call housekeeping with a hazmat kit (mostly just a good mop, bleach, and a nice smelling cleaner) to clean up the blood. The Front Desk Agent brings me the first aid kit and I wrap the foot as best as I can, explaining to the overbearing, hovering mother why you never remove impaled objects. Then, I keep the foot elevated until EMS arrives, they take him away, the father thanks me, and the family goes away.

The whole situation lasts maybe fifteen minutes. I go about my day telling guests, “No, you can’t smoke by the pool,” and, “No, you can’t throw beer bottles at the birds,” and, “Stop throwing starfish into the ocean,” and, “Sir, stop trying to take selfies with that alligator.” (These all didn’t happen on the same day, I’d have quit.)

Fast forward a few days later. Someone that looks vaguely familiar approaches me. I realize it’s the father of the injured kid. He comes up to me, shakes my hand, and tells me he’s been looking for me for a couple of days. He then hands me a cash bill. I don’t look at it when he hands it to me; it’s kind of rude to marvel at a tip in front of the guest. He thanks me for helping his son. We chit-chat for a few minutes, and he thanks me again and then leaves

I take the bill out of my pocket. It’s a hundred-dollar bill. HOLY CRAP!

Security rarely gets tipped, but that’s way over the top.