A new career, using the same old values
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- February 11, 2023
- 743
The training instructor seemed angry, coiled like a cobra, all sinews and forearms, spoiling for a fight, clearly ex-military.
For some reason he singled me out immediately.
It could have been that I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, a clear contrast to the rest of the class, spiffy in their uniforms, but I had come in on my day off and had figured just sitting in on a lecture.
It could have been my sunglasses or the length of my hair or any number of other incongruities, but standing there on the asphalt on a blindingly sunny spring morning, I was in his sights. That should have made me uncomfortable, but I’ve always liked a challenge.
“When you’re on night foot patrol,” he spat, “what do you carry?”
Seemed like a trick question since I knew that he knew the answer, but the wisest course of action — thanks to my Catholic upbringing — was to tell the truth, which is precisely what I did.
“A pen, a clipboard and a flashlight,” I responded smartly.
He smiled with a born predator’s sly grin.
“Excellent,” he said, and proceeded to tell me — and my fellow security officers — exactly how each of those items could kill a man.
My favorite was the clipboard, as innocuous a piece of equipment that I could imagine, but he demonstrated how it could be wielded in such a manner so as to target the carotid artery, thus disabling a would-be attacker with a single, deadly stroke.
I felt I had to say something before the whole thing went sideways.
“But this is a gated community,” I said, “lots of retirees, seniors.”
He was nonplussed.
“Once, I had to put down a blind guy,” he said. “You never know.”
Speaking of never knowing, once my job as senior night editor at the local newspaper had been what my bosses called “outsourced,” I faced a world of uncertainty. Oh, I could have accepted the transfer and driven 100 miles round trip daily, but that wouldn’t have pleased my wife, who was vehemently opposed to relocating and had built a rewarding career as a licensed practical nurse.
So I did what any red-blooded American boy in his mid-50s would have done. I let the Great Recession of 2008 wash over me and spent the next four years gallivanting around the country, visiting friends I hadn’t seen since high school and relaxing on the beach.
All that, of course, as well as worrying occasionally about money.
My guiding principle has always been, “All I want from money is to not need it,” which, as my wife is fond of saying, is a feeble attempt to rechannel a bit of Rolling Stones lyrical wisdom.
“That whole ‘want versus need’ thing,” she says, “is so played.”
So in summer 2012, she made it her lot in life to remind me my savings account was nearing “China Syndrome” meltdown status and that unless I got a job — soon — I’d be unable to contribute in any meaningful way to our household expenses.
Like Martin Luther in 1517, she nailed a document to my Stereo Room door, a single sheet of paper she titled “The Situation.”
Let history record that within a week of her proclamation, I had secured not only one, but two job offers, which soothed her fears.
True, one of them — working the rent-a-car desk at the airport — never left the ground, which came as a shock since I’d never been on the receiving end of the “It’s just not a good fit” trope before.
It took 10 months to work my way off the part-time roster into a coveted 40-hour-a-week position, but in that time I learned a lot about what made a good — and not so good — security officer. For one thing you had to decide which kind you wanted to be; to wit, the one who would be a help or the one who would be a hindrance.
You’d be surprised at the way, given a little bit of authority, some security professionals make it their life’s work to cause a problem when, with just a dash of empathy and a dose of common sense, most confrontations can be defused without creating a public scene. I’m not saying I was some kind of trailblazer in that method, but in a little less than a decade, I’d hung on long enough to be the senior-tenured officer on staff, outlasting most of the tough guys.
So when I found myself being schooled in the fine art of disabling a would-be attacker using only a retractable ball-point pen, I could only shake my head in bemused fashion, remembering how badly things might have gone had I mastered that skill and used it on a clearly agitated man who only wanted to drive to his girlfriend’s house and ask her why she wasn’t answering his phone calls.
Could I have pierced his jugular vein with a pen? I suppose I could have, especially after having been exposed to that gung-ho instructor and his particular brand of semi-sadistic tactics, the kind that inevitably cause escalation rather than quick crisis resolution.
I spent years talking down angry coaches in my position as sports editor and handled more than a few hundred offended readers.
The key was to be kinder — and smarter — than they expected.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page, where flashlights don’t ever hurt anyone.