KNIGHT RIDER (OR LESSONS LEARNED)

July can be hot in downtown Toronto. The pavement and concrete radiate and magnify heat. The jungle of tall buildings along Bay Street block the breezes; the air is stifling and still. The heat reminded me of my first ‘real’ job out of high school. I had taken work at a factory where machine and motor parts were made out of powdered metal. Powerful presses compacted the grey, grainy, metal bits into the desired, and carefully measured, pieces. These in turn were fed on a conveyor belt through a long furnace to be baked into hardened product. Newly hired, my assignment was to stand at the open end of the furnace, wearing padded asbestos gloves, and remove the scorching hot metal shapes from the conveyor and place them, undamaged, into a large metal bin which was taken away by a forklift for further processing. Downtown Toronto in July could feel like the heat of that furnace.

The cool air in the air-conditioned lobby of the twenty-five-floor apartment and office complex where I worked as security, refreshed and energized me. It was mid-week and I was about to begin the afternoon shift. My work partner was already at the security booth on one side of the large, marble lobby and there was a slow but steady flow of people coming and going from the office side elevators.

We exchanged greetings. I sat down at the desk and he left to begin the first walk-through of the building and below-ground parking garage levels as I turned on the bank of twenty or so closed-circuit TV monitors on the far wall of the booth. These monitors were small and provided video surveillance of the building. To see an area clearly, the screen on any monitor could be transferred to a larger monitor sitting on the desktop where I was at that moment. Opening the log book, I scanned through the most recent entries of the other shifts then wrote the date, time, both our names and the time of the first patrol. It was the end of the work day for the business offices and the flow of people through the lobby had increased. On the monitors I could see the cars pulling out of their parking spaces in the garage and working their way up, level by level, to the attendant’s booth near the exit ramp to the street.

The monitor showing the attendant’s booth caught my attention. None of the line of cars leading to his area were moving and no cars were passing his cubicle to exit the garage. The attendant stepped out of his stall and walked off-camera, apparently to see what the hold up was. I touched the button on the desktop microphone and asked my partner to return to the security booth. The attendant rushed back into view, ran a few steps toward the camera and stopped, waving his hands over his head in distress.