OK, not lightsabers exactly. Star Trek-styled medical tricorders? No, not quite like those either.
I’ve seen some security guards carrying things that look like small wands, maybe 6-7 inches long, .75 inches in diameter. They appear to have several buttons on them. If a guard pressed one of the buttons, I would not be at all surprised to find the wand emitting a lightsaber “blade.”
Instead, they press these things onto little silver buttons mounted on walls, indoors or out.
They’re used to ensure that the guard is doing a full patrol. When he presses one against the silver thing mounted on the wall, the time is recorded so that there is proof that he was really walking around and not sat in an office eating doughnuts.
Back in the day I did a stint as a security guard. My first assignment was to patrol a construction site. They were adding a wing to a shopping mall and we were to guard against equipment theft.
Day One: I’m on with two other guys. One hands me this big round clock thing. I don’t remember exactly how it worked, but I went to the various checkpoints and did something that recorded the time I was at that check point (did I insert something into the clock that was hanging there? there certainly were no electronics involved)
Anyhoo: Before making my second round, I look around for the clock thing and I can’t find it. Great, what a way to make an impression on the first day - lose the friggen clock thingy. Frantic now I’m looking everywhere, my rounds delayed. Finally doofus over there, smiling dickheadely says, “Over here!” He had purposefully hidden the thing as a pretext to some lame over-self-importantized “Constant vigilence” speech. Jerk.
My university had barcodes afixed to door frames back when I was an undergraduate. These were about two inches long by a centimeter wide and were covered with an IR-pass filter, so they looked solid black from afar.
Nowadays, for no apparent reason other than spending money to say “we spent $xxx on security last year”, they replaced the barcode stripes with RFID buttons, as you describe. They’re all hot-glued into place where the barcodes used to be.
Security guards used to prove they were doing their rounds by scanning barcodes that were posted at the appropriate places. However, lazy security guards would create photocopied sheets of the bar codes, and instead of doing the rounds they would sit at their desks and scan the photocopy.
So everyone abandoned barcodes and switched over to RFID.
The ‘big round clock thing’ does have a clock inside, along with a paper log sheet. At each patrol station, there is a metal key chained to the wall. The key has a number on the end (a different number for each station). You insert the key into the clock and turn it, and the number is recorded on the paper with the current time. Then the next day, the boss can look at that paper log and see if you were at the appropriate places at the right times. So it’s a way of checking up on the gaurds patrolling.
Sometimes you would see lazy guards with a whole ring of those keys, so they could just sit in the office all the time, and punch in with the appropriate keys at the proper times. But usually, the clock-watching that was required to do that was about as hard as actually making the rounds. And if you got the order wrong, or did it too quickly, or whatever, you had just produced solid evidence that you were cheating on your job.
Ah, the joys of the GCS (Guard Control System). When I was a student I had a job ‘guarding’ a brand-new mostly unoccupied office development. There were different patrol routes set up (within the buildings, around the perimeter, etc.). One of the strips for the external patrol was set on a post by a big ornamental pond, on the reverse (pond) side so it couldn’t be seen easily.
On a cold december night shift, my clumsy gloved fingers dropped the damn thing. 'Crinsh" went the reader thingy through the thin sheet of ice, into the meter-deep water. Cue much Keystone Kops activity with a fishnetty thing intended for removing leaves, as we discovered exactly how many idiot security guards it took to retrieve a black object from the bottom of cold muddy pond at midnight. Worst of all, the damn thing still worked afterwards so I had to finish my patrol. Bah!
A story from a retired police officer of my acquaintance: when he started out as a rookie, years and years ago, he did foot patrols and was required to “ring in” at call boxes along his beat. His sergeant would try to ensure vigilence by putting notes up on the doors of business – he was supposed to be checking up and making sure the doors were locked, there were no break-ins, etc. To verify that he was doing his job, the sergeant would stick a “simulated robbery” note on a door, and he had to remove the note and call it in at his next call, or there’d be hell to pay.
The officer were sick of this system, and they got the rookie to fix it: they told him the first time he found a note, not to do anything, and not to make the rest of his calls that night.
Sure enough, the sergeant was livid at the end of the shift: “Not only did you miss the simulated robbery going on right under your nose, but you failed to make half your calls last night!!”
At which point the other officer spoke up: “Yeah, he found the simulated robbery. Thing was, he was simulated shot. And he lay there, simulated bleeding and simulated dying all night. If he wasn’t making any of his calls, why didn’t you get out there and see what was wrong with him??”
Thus ended the era of simulated crimes on the beat in that precinct.
