Moral-Flexibility.Net

I’ve worked security (in various capacities) for the better part of my adult life. A good portion of this job requires me to deal with trespassers, drunks and or teenagers, or even occasionally drunken trespassing teenagers. Removing them is a fairly simple exercise, but like all intertaction with those that have thrown back a little too much happy juice it can go horribly wrong fairly easily.

Now, I have a deep-seated aversion to both paperwork and court time, so I tend to err a little on the diplomatic side, with the view that getting the problem child to leave without damaging the property, my car or myself is a satisfactory conclussion to the event, requiring only a short notation in an otherwise boilerplate written report.

I’ve found over time that I don’t actually talk to the problem children, drunk-ese is my second language, but my comprehension of it is limited severely by my characteristic apathy. Drunks tend to spin tales of woe filled with serpentine logic and non sequiturs that would leave me scratching my head for hours if I was actually listening. I simply nod, make the odd concerned noise and return to the point in the script where we left off before the drunk wandered down fantasy lane.

The trick is to give them the impression that you are, in fact, listening while preventing them from running too far afield with their stories before reigning them back in with a response like “Be that as it may sir, I’m going to need you to…..“, “I understand, that is not going to be resolved tonight however….“, “Ayup, that sounds like a raw deal, but I am going to need you to….“. It’s important that these interjections be used after a mental 30-60 second count. Long enough that the drunk feels he’s scored some valid arguments, but interupting him/her/it before they build up a good head of steam, and work themselves up too much.

I s’pose it’s possible to march in like gangbusters, but that almost always involves paperwork, court time and sitting around waiting for police. I’d rather talk the drunk offsite and spend my time drinking coffee somewhere than manhandling some drunk.

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