dog-of-war 11/14/2020 (Sat) 04:20:19 #73812009
Hey guys. I've been a regular on these forums for the past few years and I've alluded to having a weird job. I've told the story to a few people over the years, but never really the whole thing. Here it is, in full, I suppose.
I just turned in my two weeks notice for the weirdest job I've ever worked in my life. I've been working here for the last twelve years but its time for me to retire, and that's the end of the job for me. I'm surprised that I was able to last this long.
For context, I'm a security guard. I've been a security guard since I was a kid, back in the 70's. I've been bouncing around jobs ever since, and it's been a fine job. But back in 2008, I signed up for a new job. It seemed too good to be true at the time: what was the catch? To this day, I have some idea of what the catch is, but I'm not really 100% sure.
The job is simple: I watch the security cameras in a high-rise apartment building. I have an office in the basement (photo included). It is a team of six people. We each have a fixed eight hour shift (I started on night and swapped to day early on), five days a week. Each of us had an assigned counterpart, who covers on our days off. We have to do a sweep of the building halfway through our shift to check some blindspots, but aren’t supposed to leave the cameras if we don’t see anything suspicous on them.
The holding company that owns the place (I’ll get to them) regularly makes sure that the cameras and all the equipment are up to date, on a six month basis. They’ll hire a contractor to check out all of tech. Twice during the time I worked there, they replaced all of the cameras. If I ever report that a camera has an outage or is broken, they get it fixed within the next three days. Same thing if I report any maintenance issues – a broken lightbulb, water leakage, paint-chipping.
Here's the thing: Nobody lives in this building.
Nobody - not a single soul.
dog-of-war 11/14/2020 (Sat) 04:36:27 #73812009
In fifteen years of working as a security guard at this place, I've never seen a single tenant. I've never even seen evidence that they're showing any of the apartments in this place to anyone, nor any indication that they are trying to sell the entire complex to anyone. The place is empty and it has always been empty. There have been a few break-ins, where I've had to tell them to leave or call the cops, but no actual tenants.
To be fair, they told me the building was empty when I was hired. They explained that there were no residents, and that was the cause for the minimal security requirements.
The front door is always locked, and so are all the rest. Sometimes I take a walk around the place and try to see if any of the individual units are open, to try and get a sense of what the building is like. But the doors have been locked on all of the apartments and have been locked for the entire time I've been working here.
So I just sit in the basement in the security office and watch the cameras. There are cameras all over the ground floor, a few covering most of the staircases and upper floors. There are a few cameras that don't pivot, constantly fixated to watch single apartment doors. I don't know why - there's nothing abnormal about those apartments, in comparison to the rest of this place. My guess is that they just provide decent vantage points and have sufficient coverage, but I don't really know why.
The holding company that owns this place keeps all the security cameras up to date, but anything else they don't tend to care about. One of the elevators went out in my third year of working here and was never fixed. I don't mind, since I took the stairs to get to the basement security office anyway, and the other elevator is fine (and its not like the place gets enough traffic that matters.)
This all raises the question to me: what are they paying me for? They have this place under 24/7, on-location surveillance. But nobody lives here, nobody works here. The place is empty. All the doors are locked at all times, and we have an alarm system. What am I needed for?
dog-of-war 11/14/2020 (Sat) 14:49:00 #73812009
I've been keeping an eye on the newspapers and property records, trying to find if there have ever been a listing of the place. Nope. The owners bought the place just a few few weeks before I started my job — it seems that I was one of the first people they got to watch the place. I guess this is a good time to start talking about the people that I might be working with.
I've mentioned that this place is owned by a holding company. I'm not 100% sure of that, but I haven't been able to find any record of them actually existing outside of owning this single property or paying me. City hall has a record saying that they bought the building in 1997, but that’s about it. That leads me to think that they really only exist on the books, and aren't an actual company with any real forms of business. I'm sure if I tried harder I could probably track them down, but part of me feels that I shouldn't pry that hard into the matter. I’m worried about who I’m messing with, and I figured it’s best to not take chances. I'm not naming them here for obvious reasons.
The only person that I’ve spoken to from the holding company was the person that did my hiring. I met her again, when she offered me the change to day shift. I’ve spoken to all the other guards, and it has always been the same person: a Greek woman with an Australian accent and an eyepatch by the name of Miss Theophania Redsands. I think that is a pseudonym – it has never led anywhere in my searching. She’s not on LinkedIn, to say the least. I’m not entirely sure the eyepatch is real, either, which leads the question: why was I interviewed in disguise? Why has the same disguise been used consistently for the last twelve years?
But this the real question is, and Theophania is the best example of this: who am I working for? This job pays well. Well above what you'd normally get out of security guard job, much less one that doesn't have any reason to exist. The jobs I've had in intense environments and dangerous lines of work haven't been as good as this. Logically, I'm protecting something important — but what? I've got no evidence I'm protecting anything. There’s nothing even here. The units that are visible from the ground floor (I look into them when I do my regular sweep) are empty. Nothing in them at all.
It would be one thing if they paid us a normal amount. It makes sense to keep an eye on the property to make sure it doesn’t depreciate in value too much. Maybe there’s some legal or ownership issue preventing them from renting any of the units, but that they’ve been (foolishly but earnestly) hoping to get cleared up? But this is unbelievable. I always come back to this sinking feeling that there is something sinister taking place here. I just can’t say what, since at the same time it doesn’t feel like anything is taking place at all.
I’ve worked here for twelve years, and the swing shift guy and day cover guys (they were there when I started) say they were hired in 2001, and that the other four started alongside them. They’ve both been wondering if that was truly the start, or if there was something that forced a reset of the crew back then. The building was constructed in 1980, and like I mentioned before, bought by the current owners in 1997. That’s four years, at least, of unaccounted time.
As far as I can tell
Who, why, what, how long.
I track entry logs every so often, make sure the other guys are on the job. Nobody enters this building unless it is one of the repair teams or they have been requested by us as a repair team, and those guys are just local contractors who the holding agency puts on the payroll. They aren't actually affiliated to the main company, and they are only ever vaguely aware of who they talked to.
Some of the most exciting moments of my job there, I might add. I get to watch them and make sure they don't do anything outside of fixing the few cameras that are up. They always get a bit weirded out at the fact that I have to do that and can't leave them alone, but my employer pays well enough that I'll do anything that isn't too weird. The instructions are always very specific on that point — I have to watch them, and I can't let them go inside any of the apartments. Just the common spaces.
dog-of-war 11/14/2020 (Sat) 14:49:00 #73812009
I've come up with a collection of theories of what I think is going on here. I'm not a huge fan of any of them.
The first idea is that there's something criminal going on here, like drugs or this is a safehouse or something. It doesn't make sense, though: nobody comes in here other than the guards. I've arrived early and stayed late a few times and chatted with the other guards — and they always bring up how weird this job is before I do. Every single time. I'm the oldest guard here by a margin, and they're always trust me to know what's going on. I've been here longer than them, in the industry.
I rambled a bit there. My point is that the other guards aren't in on it, I don't think. I trust their reactions — nobody comes in. What good is a place to store drugs if you don't do anything with it?
More boring ideas follow after that: the holding company bought the building years ago, but there's some legal holdup that's preventing them from renting out tenants, and the holding company is just a subsidiary for a larger company that doesn't really care about the project enough to push on it. This would make sense — maybe the units aren't up to code. After all, I'm not allowed in and I've never seen the interiors. But I've never been able to find evidence of any architectural problems with city hall, nor in the papers.
If they're planning renovations, they're really taking their sweet time with them. It's been twelve years and I haven't seen any indication they want to renovate. No interior designers, no architects, nothing. Just prime real estate, sitting quietly away in the middle of the city. No indication that anything is wrong.
And I know it's not abandoned, either. Whenever anything goes wrong, they are always incredibly prompt to fix it. Minor damage gets fixed in three days, like I said. Major damage — like a flood that rolled in 2015 gets fixed immediately. I myself wasn't actually allowed in the building for the major renovations (they gave me some time off and said an unnamed outside contractor would handle security, since there would be so many more people present).
So what the hell is going on here? Is it just some bizarre long-term real estate investment where they don't need tenants? Who owns this building?