Firefighting (1996)

As an adult, I've been around.

Professionally.

My professional experience has ranged from working as a Security Guard at a nursing home for the elderly (don't ask), to writing software and designing information systems for a global corporate audience.

It took some trial and error to find my niche, and some of my choices were perhaps not what I'd have preferred, but the fact of life is that when you're a young parent with a mortgage and mouthes to feed, then you take whatever work is available, even if it isn't your dream job.

I was not a good security guard, I might have been, had something actually ever been happening that required me to take any sort of affirmative action, but the truth of the security business is that 99.9% of the time, nothing happens. The rest of the time is spent staring into the abyss, or walking around the perimeter with some gadget which you used to scan labels in strategic locations, to prove that you did your rounds, every 2 hours.

Imagine that then, for 12-hour shifts, alternating between dayshifts of 08:00-20:00 and night shifts of 20:00-08:00, every 7 days, with a couple of days of free time between each cycle.

Which is hell on Earth for someone used to scanning the horizon for threats or danger.

Except this one time, when something did happen.

A fire alarm in one of the buildings close by! I leapt to my feet, instantly alert, and rushed into the building, ready to rescue anyone in distress or put out any fires.

The tenant lived on the 4th floor, I vaulted upstairs, there was smoke coming from under the doorway, not the black kind but still smoke.

Where there's smoke, there's fire.

I rang the doorbell, anxiously, and waited for what felt like minutes.

Nobody answered.

Perhaps they're lying on the floor, unconscious, unable to respond.

I could picture them reaching out towards me, trying in vain to stand up as the smoke started choking them.

As a security guard, I had a master key that could unlock all doors in each apartment.

My logic was clear on this, if there was smoke and nobody was answering the door, then it had to mean danger. And danger required a response.

So I unlocked the door, pushed it open and rushed in.

I almost ended up killing the elderly woman that lived there, she'd been cooking some tasty bacon or similar, on their stove, and that had oozed to the point where the fire alarm triggered, which in turn triggered me.

She seemed close to a cardiac arrest from the shock of seeing me appear there suddenly, she didn't really seem to appreciate that I had been following protocol or that if this had been a real incident, then she would have needed actual help.

The protocol didn't include ignoring a fire alarm going off, or waiting patiently by the door until someone answered. Which logically, would have meant wating an infinite amount of time, if she had been unconscious.

Security isn't a thing for most people, when they say Security, it usually means they just want to think they are safe, without thinking about whether they actually are, or what a reasonable response to danger is.

I apologized to the matron, and backed out of the door, closing it behind me before I returned to my watchpost and the mundane. Nothing else happened.

The next day, I got summoned by my supervisor and his manager. The nice old lady had put in a complaint about the incident yesterday, saying I had barged into their apartment with no good reason.

Fortunately, they agreed with my assessment and response, once I explained what actually happened and why I'd gone in there.

It might have helped that the security logs showed that the fire alarm went off in that apartment at exactly that time, or maybe this wasn't the first time she'd set it off.

Either way, I realized this wasn't something I'd want to do for any extended period of time.

Not if I was alive, anyway.