I'm amazed at the turn over rate for security guards at my place of employment. Since I last wrote about them, the security guard population has been purged and replenished several times over. All of my favorite characters have long since departed, but a number of interesting folks have taken their place. The most harmless of the lot, and the least likely to take a bullet for me, is the pudgy guard with the bowl haircut who possesses on oddly-deep voice that is completely out of character with his physical makeup. His forehead is consistently covered in trickling beads of sweat. Like an epileptic with a nervous tick he twitches madly when he talks, causing me to bob and weave to avoid the flecks of sweat as they desperately jump haphazardly off his face while he drones on about the weather and his uncle, who apparently owns a sex shop downtown. He says he took this security job to get away from his uncle's shop because overweight guys who frequented that fine establishment kept trying to ask him out for "dates".

Another guard is a lanky kid who always sports black rings around his deeply sunken eyes. This guy likes to hang out in his beat up Nissan that he parks right in front of the main doors. He'll sit there for hours on end, one leg in his car, the other firmly planted on the pavement as Marilyn Manson violently screams from his blown speakers while he weirdly crunches his upper lip and stares intently off into space. I often wonder whether he's guarding the place, or staking it out. Conversations with him never go further than "Uh, yeah" and "I don't know...lemme ask", which is more than fine by me.

Then we have old reliable, the one guard that has remained a constant throughout the ebbs and flows of security guards. When I say hello to him, he furtively looks me in the eye for half a second while he mouths a guttural response that I've managed to interpret as either a "Why, hello there! I'm sorry I can't talk with you at the moment, but I must be off. Duty calls!" or "Gawdamnwhothefarkdoyouthinkyouareyouslimynogood...". I'm still undecided, but will continue to attempt a translation.