a hundred million stars

The Team knocks out a security guard and steals their radio. The team mimic can perfectly replicate the knocked out guard’s voice. They get caught because they pronounced the name of the company correctly.

The Team disables an alarm. The only way to do this is to rip it out of the wall and disassemble it until it physically can’t make noise anymore. This very loud process is clearly heard by the posted security guard nearby, who rolls their eyes and text their supervisor that the logistics contractors are fooling with the alarms again.

The Team breaks into the facility at night. There they meet a single security guard who is chanting potential names for NPCs in their DnD campaign out loud while they do their patrols. They encounter a fire extinguisher. They pause in their chanting to check that it is properly charged and to apply a sticker that reads, “Anal use only”. This guy is disgustingly good at their job. There’s no way around it, they’re going to catch you. And you’re going to have to deal with the fact that you’ve been had by someone who has a supply of stickers that say “Anal use only” and who unironically wanted to name their NPC shopkeep Mammogrammus.

The Team attempts to bribe a security guard. This is its own post but know there’s no way in hell that would work.

The Team breaks into the high security room and disables all the alarms. Security control sends several guards to investigate why there are no alarms going off.

The Team attempts to break into the high security room but can’t because it’s randomly decided not to let anyone at all in today.

The Team steals a keycard with “””””unlimited””””” access to the facility and gets caught because the computer system that manages keycards randomly revokes access for no reason.

Training consisted of a number of retired high ranking New York State Troopers very earnestly trying to convince a room of “dudes who desperately wanted to be a cop but couldn’t jump even that low hurdle” and also “one increasingly incredulous 19 year old girl who could only hear a loud high pitched note in one ear because she stood too close to her amps at the punk show last night” not to bring swords, shurukens, or butterfly knives into work.

We went over the “do not bring in your own weapons” lecture for the majority of day 1 of training. Day 2 was also “do not bring in your own weapons” for a lot of the day, then we moved onto “identifying the different types of fire extinguisher,” and wrapped up the day with “wasp stings.” Well, actually during “wasp stings” we had a sidebar when this one guard who looked like Ben Franklin raised his hand and shared that he, personally, took care of wasps by blowing their nests up with improvised gasoline-based explosives, so technically we wrapped up the day with “do not bring in your own weapons even if those weapons are to harm a wasp.”

Day 3 was a half day, where we reviewed everything we’d learned about no weapons, fire extinguishers, and wasps, and then we took a written test, which I finished with a perfect score in three minutes so Sargeant Minetti made me grade everyone else’s. After that, I was a full ass security guard; I picked up my fake cop uniform, badge(!!!), tiny notebook, strapped a walkie to my belt, and was given my assignment. My beat was very very literally the most public facing one that existed; while most of my colleagues were posted at gates that might never get opened for the entire summer, I had “the wholeass quarter mile of pavement abutting the chain link fence that separated the public from the ponies.” My responsibilities were simple:

1. tell people to move their rolling coolers out of the fire lane

2. take people with wasp stings to the nurse

and oh yeah

3. every time a clerk at a betting window in my section accumulated more than $10,000 dollars in cash, I had to escort them for ½ of a mile through the incredibly dense crowd of drunk people, any of whom might be interested in stealing more than $10,000 dollars, and get the money safely into the giant vault.

I remember the very first run i made. The betting clerk looked at me, the 19 year old responsible for protecting both them and $10,000. I looked back at him through the mirrored aviators that I’d bought at a gas station for 5 bucks because I thought it was very very funny and good fake cop cosplay. My walkie hissed ominously.

“…Uh, so if someone tries to take the money, what are you going to do?” He asked.

“Well, I get paid 12 bucks an hour, so… nothing.” I responded. “How about you?”

We quickly arrived at an understanding.

Two of the guards from my training group got fired that summer for bringing in their own weapons, and at least one of them had both a butterfly knife and at least one shuruken. Many more dropped out as they discovered that they would not actually be doing Die Hard shit. As for me, I did literally nothing to prevent crime all summer, but I also halfheartedly cleared a path through the crowd at the front of a very sad “St. Patrick’s Day In July” parade, which made me enough of a success story that they actually called me unprompted to ask if I’d come back the next year… with one caveat.

See, the next year I returned as a weathered veteran with a spotless disciplinary record, so they gave me three hours of additional training to get a certification to become a peace officer. As a result, from ages 20-23 (when my license expired) I had the same legal powers of arrest as a police officer.

Me. They just gave me that.

And that zero experience turned out to be a problem, because we hadn't had much to do with birds and the thing about a bird's feathers, right, is that you've got a feather that sits in a little sheath thing that's rooted in the body. So what you want to do is pull the feather and sheath both out. But if you're a little kid who's never done this before, all too often, the feather comes out and leaves the sheath in the body. So we'd be doing our best but the ducks would come out maybe a quarter plucked properly and otherwise still full of these feather sheaths, and then it's a matter of going back and pulling all these little sheaths out.

I remember quite clearly, my mother and aunt helping us with this part, because it's fiddly and we were taking forever. They'd take the plucked ducks and re-pluck them properly. And I remember my mum making a remark to my aunt (not maliciously, she didn't know I could hear and was just making conversation), "You know, it would've been easier for us to just do it from the start and not have to deal with all these fiddly little bits." And she was absolutely right -- my brother and I were involved for our benefit in the same way you get a young kid to "help" wash the dishes, we were learning a life skill. But even though we'd done most of the work, we'd removed most of the unwanted mass from the duck's skin, we'd actually made things harder. We'd removed all the feathers and a quarter of the sheaths, but the sheaths are much easier to remove with the feathers attached, so working on a "mostly plucked" duck was a lot more work for the adults than just doing the whole duck from scratch would have been.