Need a New Job? Maybe You’d Like to be a Security Officer! Read These Crazy Stories!

First day working a retail security job. I show up a few minutes early, and witness a man dressed in the company's uniform getting tossed into the back of a police car by about 4 officers. He's freaking out, struggling against them, screaming at the top of his lungs, and is one very, very small step away from getting hit with a stun gun or pepper spray. To this day, I'm amazed at their restraint.

After getting inside, I discovered that he was the previous security guy, and that they had coordinated his arrest with the police for the start of my shift. Per my new boss: "Not because we wanted to scare you. We just didn't want a gap in coverage."

Turns out, the guy had made off with something in the vicinity of $25k worth of goods over the previous couple of months, and only got caught because he was stupid and greedy.

While a shoplifter was running from us and heading into a wooded area, my supervisor started barking like a dog. We couldn't see the woman and couldn't hear her running anymore, but we saw her tracks in the snow. My supervisor keeps barking and yells that he is going to send the dog in after her. She screams that she is giving up and to not send the dog in. We get her cuffed and the whole way walking back to our office she is freaking out about how she is afraid of dogs and to keep it away from her... She never caught on that there was no dog.

I was training a new guard, an immigrant from Somalia, and he was very unfamiliar with everything about America. One night around 3am we saw a skunk walking around outside of our guard shack. My trainee had never seen one before and asked what it was. I explained that it was a skunk and exactly what would happen if he got too close to it. Well he didn't believe me and decided it looked like a cat, he got sprayed and I made him stand outside the shack. It was also his first winter in Ohio.

This happened in during Oktoberfest a few years back. It was a cold night and pretty quiet for the most part. Three officers were hanging around the Control Room when one spotted a man on camera, running through the parking completely naked. So off go two officers and the Senior Officer to investigate. One of the officers decided to play it smart and wait by the entrance to see if the naked John Doe would come back the way he came. He then hears some yelling from the apartment building across the street, "Get back here! Security is after you!" Sure enough, after a few minutes, Naked John Doe comes streaking out of the stairwell and towards the garage entrance and right into our officer. The Senior Officer showed up and made the guy sit on the near freezing ground while we decided what to do. Turns out, Naked John Doe lost a bet whilst out drinking with his buddies and was required to run from the top of the garage to the bottom of the garage. We had no idea that our VP was going to read it. Thankfully, he thought it was pretty funny.

I used to work in a pharmaceutical factory and we hired the weirdest people. One particularly weird older lady swapped a shift with me overnight, and when it came time for her to cover my shift (which was the following night shift I had covered for her), she called in sick and I was the only person who could cover. This would have been fine but I was commuting to community college at the time and when I got the call to come in, I hadn't slept from the night before because of my class schedule. I ended up staying awake for 41 hours, and had never been up longer than 30 hours at that point. By 36 hours awake during this shift I started hallucinating and on my tours I thought every inanimate object was a person doing something. I thought I caught people having sex only to find out it was a parked fork lift, and also could have sworn I had a beaver run over my feet in the administrative office, and I fell over from it.

My best story is also my worst. Working security for Target, we had a guy come in and steal a bicycle pump. When we approached him in the parking lot, he had a bicycle with a cart attached. He was clearly homeless, and he was furiously trying to inflate one of the tires on the bike. My boss had already called the cops, but after seeing the man's circumstances, I couldn't l let him be arrested, so I ran back inside and paid for the pump myself. When the cops showed up, I told them everything was fine. My boss was pretty pissed about the whole thing, but I didn't care. I quit over the b.s. from the whole ordeal. I don't regret it one bit though.

I worked at a place where it turned out, the security guard himself became homeless. At first he just seemed a bit rough around the edges, dirty clothes and looked like he needed a shower. Then his behaviour changed and he started doing odd things. Eventually the manager talked to him and found out the guy's wife cheated on him and told him to get out, so he just up and left his wife and kids in the house. Turned out he was securing the place during the night, then hiding out in some store room in the basement and sleeping in the day. He wasn't making a lot of money and he wanted his kids taken care of so most of it was still paying for the home he was no longer allowed to sleep in.

Happily that the manager was able to rent the guy one of the store rooms he'd been sleeping in officially for super cheap till he was able to get back on his feet, and was able to help secure him some legal advice so he wasn't taken advantage of. Terrible thing homelessness, but in this case a beautiful thing that someone reached out to help the poor guy.

One awful incident that happened to me when I just started working in casino surveillance. It was about 8pm and I went on a break and in my typical fashion, I walked around the building to get some fresh air. I liked to get away from the cameras and knew a few choice places where I could stand outside that were away from the prying eyes of the CCTV.

So there I was minding my own business, taking a break from it all, when this "kid" approached me who looked like the fluke man from the X-files - he looked about 14, was bald, sickly pale and had sores all over his face. He explained to me that he had cancer in its advanced stages and to look at him you knew it instantly. I was so taken back by how ghastly he looked that when he asked me for some money for food I automatically got out my wallet and gave him about three fiddy... seriously though, I gave him $20 and finished my break.

About 5 minutes into returning from my break a security guard broadcasts over the two-way radio that they need to give medical attention to a minor in the casino. They gave a location, I punched in a camera number and there was my little friend. My co-worker sitting next to me (whose worked surveillance since the casino opened) see's what I'm seeing and quickly broadcasts that this guy is in fact of legal age, there's absolutely nothing wrong with him, but he's banned from the casino and that he uses his appearance to coax money out of fools. So of course with that, the entire surveillance department began reviewing footage of the guy to see which sap gave him the money. So I basically start shitting myself thinking "what the hell have I done, I've given money to a banned patron to gamble and now every single person here is gonna find out and I'll lose my job". Luckily the spot I took my break in was a blind spot and they never found out.

One night the dog we have protecting everything goes ballistic and takes off into the back fields. I called the spare farm hand and let him know shit was going down and I took off after him. So here I am running around at 2:00am in a field toting a shotgun looking for this damn dog and I hear him making vicious fighting noises and I'm playing over scenarios in my head. Finally farm hand gets out here on the atv and we spot him tearing up a tree branch that fell out of a tree.

I work at a semi conductor plant and we have a, "phantom pooper." Two or three times a year around the cubicle areas someone decides to drop their pants and just poop right in the middle of a hallway or in someone’s cubicle. This has been going on for years and we still have no idea who is doing this.

Most memorable was when I was working a bar/club known for having significant crime, date-rape and even shootings. Well, I'm working door checking IDs with my partner Shawn, there's a lineup 40 people long, when a group of 3 guys come up and try to walk right past us. Myself being a relatively average height but generally scary looking individual, and Shawn, a 6'4" 400lbs football QB, they literally bounced off of us and then tried again to just push their way through. We said that the lineup starts down there (pointing to the end of the line), when 5'4" 120lbs "gangsta" says "naa man I'm clubbin now" or some general uneducated riffraff. He tried a third time but Shawn wasn't having any of it. He picks up the guy over his head and throws him 3 car lengths away, landing in a snow bank. His two friends with him go rushing over to see if he's ok. Well, not even 30 seconds go by and I hear POP as a .22 (found out that after the fact) fires off and hits Shawn directly in center mass chest, heart area. Shawn goes running after the guy and just jumps on top of him, belly flopping and crushing a few of his ribs, breaking the guys forearm and dislocating his other shoulder (he tried to stop Shawn with both arms extended outwards). Little did I know Shawn was wearing a vest, which saved his life, and his quick reaction saved my life as I'm sure he was going to fire off towards me next.

The other two guys were detained by a few off duty firefighters in the line, while the main shooter was taken away in cuffs in an ambulance. Needless to say the two firefighters and their entire group drank free that night.