Fuck stupid-ass security measures!!!

The BBQ Pit
1

I don’t go to work expecting to be 100% safe. I don’t get in my car and expect to be 100% safe. I don’t fucking take an airplane and expect to be 100% safe. Like all shit in life, I understand there are some inherent danger involved just being alive.

So last week some stalker gets inside my work place and flashes and gun. He left, the police caught him. The end.

Now, my work place is trying to be fucking fort knox. What the fuck, half the doors are disabled. “Security” guards are stationed at every entrance and even when I beep in the doors, they want me to beep in again using a card reader and check over my ID. What’s even more fucking silly is that there are plenty of ways to get around without having to jump through fucking hoops.

I am fucking sick of all this security bull shit!

I CAN’T EVEN GET MY MORNING COFFEE without getting stopped by “security” and told to go to the “front” and beep in. What the fuck is wrong with this world? I am not a fucking coffee drinking terrorist! My normal 3 minute coffee run takes twice as long. My normal walk from the parking lot takes twice as long. If I (gods forbid) forget my card, it takes 25 fucking minutes to “clear” me.

Today I ignored the fucking wanna-be-security guard and got my coffee without stopping. The fucking guard just let me go! WTF? If you’re going to fucking screw with people, at least be consistant!

Fuck you safety pussies. Fuck the laws that let people sue over this shit. I’m sure our building security isn’t fucking worried about us workers. No, their worried about being sued. Fuck, it’s not like we’re a bank. We have no money, nothing worth stealing.

Gods damnit. I hope someone else gets in and causes trouble. Just to make management realize these sorts of security measures don’t work. All they do is piss off the people they’re “protecting”. I hope our governments (Canadian and American) fucking realize this as well. All the stories I read about 90 year old people getting harshly searched just pisses me off.

2

So this extra security which probably makes a larger percentage of the building feel safer and inconveniences you by 3 minutes is bad how, again? :rolleyes:

3

Because if it only makes people feel safer without causing them to be safer, it isn’t worth much. If you re-read the OP, you’ll see that the poster ignored the security guard at one point and nothing happened.

4

But that’s just it. “Feels” safer is right. We’re not any safer. A mad man with a gun would blow through our “security” without breaking a sweat. Our doors are glass and wouldn’t take much to get through them. In fact, our security has so many damn holes I just see it as a waste of time (this building wasn’t designed with security in mind).

We’re as secured as we’re going to be. All this extra effort is just a fucking pain in the ass. The only plus is that I’m getting plenty of excersize taking several stairs getting around security (saves me time and works on my legs!).

I assume this is the same shit Americans have to go through at an airport. I just hope this hysteria doesn’t spread too much up here (airport security here isn’t very special and wasn’t any better than pre-9/11).

5

I understand what you’re saying. I work in an office building with several dumb security measures in place. Can only enter and exit through one door, despite the fact that there are at least 6 or 7 doors around the perimeter. Must show a badge to get past the guard station, although they never take the time to actually look at the badge. I could wave someone else’s badge or even a video rental card at them, and they’d never know. We do have to swipe our badges to enter the department, but this was the case since well before 9/11. If we forget our badge, a department head is supposed to come down and vouch for us, but that sometimes relaxes to a phone call “Yeah, he’s OK, let him up” without ever verifying my identity.

Having said that, the sense of security around here is pretty good. Sure we have a few wackos who think that every delivery truck that drops off supplies, food, payroll, whatever, is loaded to the roof with explosives, or that any plane that flies in a little low (we’re about 5 miles from the local airport, and our department overlooks the runways. Low airplanes are a fairly routine sight) is going to take a sudden turn into the building. I’d imagine every workplace has people like that.

Yeah, we’re as secure as we’re gonna get, but doing something that increases the sense of security isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

6

Ah yes, the appearance of security, rather than the real thing. We have that annoying crap here to.

Just to cheer you up a bit, I think I’ll share a truly laughable “security” measure. Post 9/11 the management company that maintains the building where my girlfriend works decided to beef up their “security.” They decided their biggest problem was that people were using the back door on Broadway for possibly nefarious reasons (like cutting a block and a half off of the walk to the parking lot), and they wanted everyone to use the front door on State Street. So they put up a sign on the Broadway entrance, “Please Use State Street Entrance.” They didn’t bother to lock the door or anything. I think they were saving that little drastic measure for a future upgrade. It was airtight, I tells ya.

I say “was” because they’ve since taken the sign down.

7

Unless it makes people complacent by lulling them into a false sense of security… If security is both highly visible and ineffective, chances are people are not going to question something slightly odd that they’ve seen because they assume the security guys have everything under control.

8

My favorite stupid-ass security measure:

No metal butter knives inside the secure zone at airports, including on airplanes. So, you go to a restaurant in the airport between flights, or ride first class with a meal, and you get…

A plastic knife.

So, you ask, what’s the problem?

The plastic knives are sharper than the metal butter knives. Plus, you can quite easily sharpen the plastic knife into a serious weapon using a brick wall. The metal knife won’t cut through a pizza, much less a person, and it would take hours of work to sharpen it to a useful weapon.

The metal knife is less of a weapon than the replacement plastic knife. This has been pointed out to the TSA, and the Homeland Security Department, but their policy remains unchanged.

Most security measures are all for show.

The locks on your car? Just to keep the the average guy, (and the inept) honest. Those locks clearly don’t stop real, determined theives. Same for the locks on your house – they’ll keep wandering idiots out, but even you can break in pretty easily, can’t you?

As long as there is wealth inequity, racial bigotry, or religious strife (to name but a few causes) there will be people struggling against other people. And always, more will lose than will win. Before someone points out that this is the Pit, not IMHO, realize that this struggle is the true obscenity of our time.

9

I somewhat sympathize with the OP, and rest assured, my building has a hell of a lot more security than yours, and there certainly are holes that could be exploited, no doubt.

However, I am fed up with all this attitude of “this security is worthless because I can see that it’s not perfect” crap. Well, no shit. Nobody wants to work in a maximum security prison. The point of guards and badges and checkpoints and cameras and stuff is 99 percent of the time not to make a building inpenetrable, but simply to make it harder to penetrate. It’s the difference between being a soft target and a harder target; that doesn’t mean that security is ‘just for show.’

And if I hear one more time silly allegations like “plastic knives are actually really dangerous,” or “even I could kill someone with a ball-point pen, which they let through airport security!!!” I will challenge that person to a fight. You bring your plastic knife or ballpoint pen and try to hurt me. I will laugh my ass of as I kick yours around the block.

10

Yep. I stopped obsessing about locking, or even closing, my back door after I realized the plate glass window wasn’t much of a deterrent…

11

I understand what you mean, but in my dull house in my dull neighborhood I have to worry far more about bored teenagers than professional thieves. Locking my car and house does what I want it to. I have enough security without having to feel like I’m living in a prison.
A reasonable amount of security in exchange for a reasonable hassle seems to be what the OP is asking the universe for. His company has increased his hassle without increasing the amount of security he’s actually getting. That does not seem reasonable to me, other than it’s providing desperatly-needed jobs in our still sucky economy.

12

Anyone else remembering the episode of News Radio with the security guards?

Wahahahahaha!

-Joe, misses Phil

13

The deterrant in this case is that we have nothing to steal and nothing of any importance except maybe some hot women in Customer Service. We don’t even have an onsite store! We do have a cash counter but that’s secured via security plastic (like a bank teller).

It’s not so much that I don’t like security. I don’t want to see bums walking around my work place (homeless bums, not the bums I normally see :D) but getting harrassed at 3 “check points” is just busy-work and no use to anyone. I don’t even need to show my card, only that it works!

I hope I never get “carded” going to the washroom.

What’s truely sad is that because they have stationed guards at 6 entrances (other than the main) there are LESS revolving patrols. If I wanted to let my buddies in from the back, it’s much easier!

Exactly.

14

I don’t think Danalan’s point was that plastic knives are really dangerous. The point is that the plastic knives are actually more dangerous than your average metal butterknife. Which, I can tell you from experience, is true. I’ve gotten more than one unpleasant cut from a plastic knife, never from a metal butter knife. And the plastic knife could be fairly easily transformed into something truly dangerous. It’s fairly easy to put an edge on a plastic cutting tool, and some plasticware is actually quite sturdy so it wouldn’t easily break before it could be put to nefarious purposes.

It isn’t so much “a plastic knife is a dangerous weapon” as it is “a plastic knife is something you could easily make a dangerous weapon out of.”

15

So we both acknowledge that is it possible to rub one object against something and create something sharper.

I don’t want to give any terrorist secrets away, but if one could sharpen a plastic knife in such a way, might there be some kind of technology or techniques that could be used to, say, covertly sharpen a butter knife? :eek: Or do you contend that butter knives have some kind of anti-sharpening properties that insure that they cannot ever be used as weapons?

We know that plastic knives are generally smaller, and always more bendy, than stainless steel knives. Right? So the corellary would be that stainless steel knives are generally bigger and stronger, and moreover, even more capable of holding a sharp edge. So explain to me again why “plastic knives are actually more dangerous than your average metal butterknife,” as you put it?

16

:rolleyes:

OK, first off, plastic knives are more dangerous than metal butter knives because metal butter knives have blunt edges and plastic knives have those little sharp teeth. Handle it the wrong way, and you can end up with a nasty cut on your finger or hand, which is not true of a metal knife butter knife. You really have to put some effort into hurting someone with it.

As to the sharpening issue. Sure, technology exists for sharpening metal knives. But, say you wanted to improvise a weapon on the spot in a short period of time, say a few minutes. Even with a good knife sharpener or whetstone, it’s going to take you a good, long while to put a good edge on a metal butter knife. A plastic knive, a few minutes of rubbing on pavement or a stone/brick/concrete wall, pillar or doorjamb would make it lethal. And yes, plastic is bendy. Easily compensated for by holding more of the handle in your hand than you would with a sturdier knife, and bracing the flat edge of the blade with your finger.

17

Nobody in their right mind is saying that a plain ol’ standard issue butterknife is dangerous. Butterknives can be made very dangerous because they can be sharpened to easily slice through flesh. I’m sure today’s busy terrorist could spare a minute or two to sharpen a steel knife if he really wanted to; it’s not that difficult. I Thus, it makes a certain amount of sense to ban them from airplanes.

(Further, I question whether you’ve used a whetstone recently. I’m no expert, but the few times I have done it, it only took a minute or two – maybe three, tops – to put an edge on a dull, unfinished knife.)

Plastic knives without sharpening can cause superficial cuts, but it’d take a ninja to be truly deadly with them. I don’t think that airport authorities are worried about cuts on one’s fingers. Thus, it is a better choice of utensil for airplanes.

I’m still waiting for an explaination of why a sharpened metal knife is less dangerous than a sharpened plastic knife.

18

It’s not that the sharpened plastic knife is less or more dangerous. It’s that replacing a dull metal knife with a sharp plastic knife is a stupid-ass security measure.

Does anybody really think that hijacking airplanes with knives is possible anymore? I don’t care if the hijackers are armed with fucking machete’s – the passengers ain’t going down without a fight.

19

Like you said previously, these precautions aren’t really to keep you safer; they are to guard against lawsuits. Effective or not, they allow your company to demonstrate that after a dangerous incident they took measures to increase security, thereby making it much more difficult for someone to claim negligence in a lawsuit.

20

A butter knife is made of steel which won’t bend or break easily when you stab something with it. Yes, the plastic knife has a sharper edge that can cut pizza, but you’re not carving a turkey or slicing a tomato here, you’re trying to hurt someone. If you want to do damage, steel beats plastic any day of the week.

Most security is designed to keep out only the more ambivalent criminals anyway, like the wandering loser with a gun that was in badmana’s office. He get’s questioned at a doorway, maybe he decides to go away. If nobody questions him or puts up even the smallest hurdle, why would he turn around?

Having security might not prevent all crime, but it at least takes away the welcome mat.