Qualified Labor

The sub-machinegun in the fat woman’s hands pointed in every direction but up. As she chuckled, the barrel would loll lazily up and down like a rowboat at sea. When she shifted her weight from one side of the seat to the other the target would switch from my kneecap to my lower abdomen and back. My limited knowledge of anatomy, gleaned from a pair of wilderness medical courses, half forgotten biology classes, and emergency room dramas, filled in the details. Bang! A bullet shatters my femur, the inferior vena cava ruptures, and I bleed to death on the way to a malaria clinic- the nearest place with clean bandages. Pop! The bullet passes through my lower intestine then hipbone, and I die a week later of a lingering infection brought on by gall spillage into the rest of my body. Crack! The bullet only cuts through my shinbone under the knee, and aside from never being able to walk straight again, I recover. This seems the best option that presents itself as the gun completes its pendulum swing.

Actually the best option is that the foot-long clip protruding out from in front of the trigger guard has no bullets in it. That is sometimes the case in developing nations when security guards must provide their own weapon and ammunition. Or perhaps it is not a real gun at all, but an elaborate replica, sold to the woman at a substantially lower price than the real thing, intended to do no more than discourage would-be thieves. That would be nice.

I had eyed the gun and its gross mishandling as the woman entered the bank. I smiled in a state of surreal bemusement to my coworker sitting next to me. We had been waiting on the bench for a friend who was at the teller. As the woman passed us we glanced at each other, both hoping that she and her spiraling firearm would not sit down. It was not to be. The woman wore a green jacket and a camouflaged skirt. The jacket was the kind you see in a full dress military parade. The skirt was the kind you see at monster truck rally or wet t-shirt contest. She smiled merrily as she chatted with a bank employee who she knew. I could not tell if she was on duty or coming to collect her pay. The only thing I could tell was that she had no concern for gun safety.

The only gun I have ever fired was a .22 caliber hunting rifle. Given the size of the shells and the rate of fire, you could assume that it was intended only to bring down animals under around two hundred pounds that could be killed with a single shot. A person can be killed with a .22, but a moose, bear or wild boar would likely end up very angry at the sudden inconvenience of a bullet in the backside. The gun I fired was adept at punching holes in paper targets at up to 100 yards. Further away than that and the targets were safe, as long as it was I behind the trigger. The process of removing a spent cartridge and getting the next one in the chamber ready to fire took at the least a second, and more if you wanted to aim the second shot.

At the rifle range, firearm safety is paramount. When the voice over the loudspeaker calls for guns to be lain down, they are lain down, chambers open and empty. There is no touching the guns until the voice says the range is clear and gives the go ahead to begin shooting again. A gun in the hand was carried unloaded, preferably in a case, always pointed either at the ground or the sky. It may be the case that in the fifteen-plus years since I have been to the rifle range, safety regulations have changed. Perhaps now it is standard protocol to let the barrel of your gun swing past every person in range. If so, the guard at the bank followed safety standards to the letter.

The possibility of a sweaty palm dropping the weapon that now sat two empty seats away and spraying bullets all over one side of the room was both very real and somehow hilarious. The jolly, rotund, heavily armed and camouflaged woman had all the necessary qualifications to play Aunt Jemima in a syrup commercial. This Aunt Jemima makes pancakes for the Zapatistas and conjures Che Guevara’s ghost. Or she blithely puts the rebels in the square out of their proletarian misery as she smiles in a matronly manner to General Dictatopolous, telling him to wipe the maple syrup away from the corner of his mouth.

Her employment in the position of security guard meant that someone saw this woman as qualified to provide protection for the largest concentration of wealth in a fifty-mile radius. Any person with a preconceived notion of how a security guard should behave would be quite surprised at this hire. She could not move quickly, she was oblivious to her surroundings, and she handled a weapon capable of slaughtering every person in the room as if she were burping a baby. But so it goes.

Qualifications are relative. Relatives often get hired instead of qualified people. Job security is a political issue, not a performance issue. That is unless you screw up so royally that it makes headlines, in which case it is still a political issue, only now performance factors in to the politics. A job can support a person’s family as well as their own self; to not have a job is to live in poverty. Anyone would rather keep a job than lose it. Given these premises, it makes sense to simply not do your job, because in doing it, you run the greater risk of screwing up and getting fired. Show up, exist quietly, and collect your paycheck. And so it takes a half hour to deposit money at the bank, and the security guards may pose a greater threat to life and limb than armed robbers.

Some combination of the serious and the ridiculous, curiosity and the desire to avoid socially awkward escape to the other side of the teller kept us in our seats. Of course it would have been prudent to simply wait outside, putting a thick cement wall between the potential machine-gunning and us. But the woman had not been fired yet, which means she had yet to let any stray bullets hit anyone. Given the circumstances, that made her pretty well qualified to handle the weapon. One can take comfort in that. One can also take comfort in the air conditioning inside the bank, but outside the bank you might die of heat stroke, so why take such a risk?