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Wednesday, February 04, 2004
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PROFESSIONAL HORROR STORY
So as I mentioned briefly last night, I quit my job. In retrospect, I really shouldn't have posted about it at all. I had a very, very bad feeling about it before I even walked in the door. I figured the odds were about 50/50 that it wouldn't last the week. When I posted, I got a little enthusiastic. That happens sometimes. My optimisim gets the better of my judgement.
First, I should give a little backround.
I was desperately trying to avoid getting another security job. It's a loathesome industry and the fact that I'm actually good at it is but one of the many curses of my life. I've worked malls and I've supervised multiple office towers at a time. I've done liason work with the corperate security divisions of some of the largest companies in the world. I can manage a staff and I can make clear what I need done to exceptionally stupid people. I'm not blowing sunshine up my own ass, but I'm very good at what I do for a living. Anybody can be a mall cop but very few people have the breadth of experience that can allow them to deal with the president of the phone company, the Premier of Ontario and the owner of the most exclusive clothing chain in Canada as easily as they can deal with the homeless or skateboarding shithead teenagers.
For these reasons, I'm considered something of a find in the industry.
So, a couple of weeks ago I e-mailed my resume off to one of Ontario's bigger companies. They called me almost immediately and asked me to come in and sit down with them. No biggie. I was expecting that. I go into said companies office, fill out some paperwork and about 20 minutes later, the president of the company comes out and asks me to come to his office. This is a good sign. Presidents of security compaies never, but never interview new hires. That's usually left to account managers.
The president sits me down and looks over my resume and starts telling me how wonderful I am. He also asked what I was looking for. Something that never happens in that industry either. Then he tells me that they're taking over a high profile condominium on the first. Mel Lastman, the recently former mayor of Toronto lives there (he's the Hated Famous Person I wrote about last week) and he'd like me to be the site supervisor. I tell the president that I've never worked a condo before and that should be kept in mind - condos operate in the opposite way that commercial properties do - but with adequate training (and keep that phrase in mind because it'll be important later) everything should be great. Then I was told that I could skip the two day orientation course because of my experience and I just had to come in for some hazardous materials training and get fitted with a uniform. The hazmat training was funny, insofar as I've actually dealt with bomb threats and Anthrax scares before, but I need to be taught that bleach is bad if you drink it. This is what the province dictates though so I have to do it. Fair enough.
A couple of days later, I call in to schedule the uniform fitting and the WHMIS (technical term for battery acid = bad) training and I'm told I need to be there for the two day orientation, unpaid of course. I told the operations girl that I got a waiver on that from the owner of the company. Her reponse; "The president isn't involved in the day to day operations of the company and you need to be there." Now THAT sounded really familiar. But what the hell, it should be amusing, if nothing else. I took their little "how to be a security guard" course and took their test. I scored 99% on the test. Everything looked good. Then.......nothing. The first was fast approaching and I heard nothing from these people. This was also really familiar. Then I got a call to go in for an interview with the Property Manager. In the security industry you deal pretty closely with property management. Actually, very closely. In a matter of minutes you tend to forget that you don't actually work for them.
What should've been a 30 minute interview stretched on for nearly two hours. This woman couldn't say enough nice things about me. She told me about the other people she interviewed and some of the problems the building was having. I told her that while I'd never worked a condo before, with the adequate training it seemed like nothing I couldn't handle. Then I waited for four days for the phone to ring. Nothing.
Then last Tuesday, I got a call saying they were doing site training on Friday. Uh-oh. The contract changes over on Monday. "How long is the training" I ask. "Four hours, from 9 to 1" was the answer. This decidedly did not sound like "adequate training." But, hey...maybe it's not as complicated as I thought.
Here's what the training consisted of: how the fire panel works and about thirty minutes of a tech mumbling about the electronic access control system. And I could barely understand the tech. If I couldn't understand him, I knew nobody else would. But that wasn't my main concern. That was reserved for the fact that there was nothing, not a word about policies and procedures. But hey, there's always the Post Orders, right? Oh, post orders are like the Bible to how any commercial property works and how to address almost anything that comes up. Stands to reason that they'd be there, right? Wrong. The company and property management hadn't gotten together to write them yet. And post orders take WEEKS to write properly. I've seen revisions of existing post orders take up to six months to get done. I've been involved in writing them. It takes a long, long time. I should've smelled the lingering doom then and there. I didn't. I'm not real bright that way.
That's not to say that I wasn't really, really uneasy. I was but I counted on two things. Firstly, I counted on the fact that this was a new account and that the company would do everything possible to keep the client, and since I'm the main contact with the client, happy. I also figured that the property manager seemed impressed with me and would sympathize with my situation. Keep in mind, I told her that I'd never worked that type of building before and that I needed adequate training on policies and procedures. So both ends of the deal woud have my back because it's in their interest for them to, right?
Wrong.
First thing Monday morning I show up bright and early (actually, it was still dark out) and meet with the client and account rep. I make it fairly clear, in a very friendly way, that I'm uncomfortable with the lack of backround on anything but the fire panel -which I could've figured out myself in about 20 minutes. Their response: "Ahhhh, you'll figure it out in time. Oh and you have not one, but two people to train tomorrow . Okay? Great! BYE!" And then I was on my own.
Well, not entirely on my own. There were a slew of binders, forms and loose sheets on my desk from that were left behind from the old company. These would've been kind of helpful if they were in some kind of order. But they weren't. So every time a resident came up and demanded something, I'd scramble through this assemblange of crap and wing it. I did pretty well, too. I'm pretty versitile under pressure. People seemed pleased and I was kind of proud of myself. Okay, I was about as proud of me as you'd be if you were stuck with the daily reminder that you wear a clip-on tie. I went home and slept the sleep of angels.
Cut to the next day. I already knew that this would be a twelve hour shift. Security companies are notorious for fucking up schedules. But I've never seen it done as quickly as this one did. The property manager demanded a second person during the day and instead of bringing someone in from somewhere else, they pulled my afternoon guy. That left Tuesday afternoon to be covered. Guess who got nominiated? Silly me for thinking that being the boss had some perks. I walk in the door at 7:30 yesterday to get thourougly reamed by the property manager because a couple of pretty important things weren't done properly. Here's a synopsis of the conversation;
"What happened last night, skippy?"
"I don't know property managing lady. You'll notice I just walked in the door."
"Well, this, this and this weren't done properly. Why?"
"I don't know. I wasn't here."
"Why didn't they know that this should've been done this way and that should've been done that way?'
"For starters, because I didn't know that. I can't train people to do things I myself don't know."
Then she went to her office.
Anybody who has a staff or children is going to love the rest of this story. Ever try to train people on things that you're only guessing about? It's a lot like when your parents tried to help you with your math algebra homework. I was attempting to do this with not one, but TWO people. One of whom was fantastic, an African girl about my age. Really cute, too. And smart. I dig that. The other one was about 115 years old, loud and stupid. I was trying to feel my way around the policies enough to explain it to two people, one of whom would ever hope to understand it. All the while, I had 107 condominiums worth of very old, very, very wealthy people demanding all kinds of interesting things. I resorted to doing something I really hate doing. I asked the property manager for clarification on a couple of things. Needless to say, her patience grew short rapidly. She made her displeasure with the way the contract was starting known.
She was actually very diplomatic. She made it clear that she wasn't pissed at me. She knew I was just hanging on by my fucking fingernails. But she didn't like the oversights that were coming out of head office and they way things were generally being handled. Then I knew I was fucked. The writing was on the wall.
The security business is notoriously insecure. The contracts that govern them aren't like any you'll find elsewhere. They are in effect for a set period of years, but either side can terminate them with 30 days notice. This frightens security companies greatly. These contracts are potentially worth millions of dollars and companies are loath to lose them, knowing that any putz with 500 bucks and a clip-on tie can set up his own company and underbid the big companies with the added bonus of "personal attention." I've seen that happen, too. Therefore, if a contract starts to look like it may be in trouble, they first thing they do is ice the supervisor. Accountability only goes as high as the highest ranking guy in a clip-on tie. I have yet to see it go higher. Not once in 9 years have I seen an account rep take it in the neck. And with the way that things were going wrong, my days were numbered, litterally in days. It was that ugly. Here's another little industry secret. In Ontario, all contract security guards have to be licenced by the province. The licence is and remains the property of the company and every time you get a new job, you get a new licence. On the application, one of the questions they ask is, "Have you ever been fired or asked to resign a position?" An answer in the affirmative can make getting relicenced very interesting.
So I got the fuck out while the getting was good. I actually feel pretty good about it, too. That was the ugliest 24 hours of my working life. And I've some ugly, ugly incidents in this profession. Besides, they lied to me about how much money I'd be making. They cited a probationary number, which, while on the small side of acceptable, at least held out the promise of significant improvement in three months. Turns out that wasn't the case at all. The number quoted was the final number, no if ands or buts for the forseeable future. My last job was stressful as well, but my income went up ten grand in less than a year. It held some promise. This one didn't. All it held was misery and the constant threat of imminent unemployment. There are all kinds of other little details that no one other than I will find amusing, so I think I'll leave it at that.
Welcome to my nightmare. Enjoy your stay.
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