TriumphAnt

At work, I am now officially a “Stair Warden (Back-up)”, the result of a recent series of exchanges that culminated in my volunteering to help out “however you think you can use me” with the authoritatively named “12TH FLOOR BUILDING EMERGENCY ORGANIZATION TEAM”.

So I am a back-up stair warden. But despite the title, apparently this does not mean I race to the stairwells and order descending people from 13 and 14 to go “back up”. No, I am the emergency warden equivalent of a bench-warmer.

In a nutshell, this means that when a general alarm sounds and it is not a drill (and assuming, of course, that someone in front of me on the list of stair wardens is away and I as back-up am called into action) that I am responsible for aggressively touring around some as-yet-to-be designated chunk of the 12th floor. I snuffle around like a truffle hog spying out miscreants who prefer not to have to descend 12 flights of a stairwell – whose population increases exponentially the closer you get to the bottom – until they actually smell smoke. I am to urge everyone to get to the nearest stairwell and exit the building.

To help me achieve this end, I have been given an armband and a flashlight. The armband is a six-inch wide strip of velcro-fastened evil-looking black nylon around which has been sewn a two-inch wide fluorescent yellow stripe that apparently will leap into view when the headlights of an approaching fire truck illuminate it. (I say “apparently” because I am aware of no test yet devised that has married the requirements of darkness and a fire truck’s headlights… on the 12th floor… to validate the claim of luminosity attributed to the armband.)

According to my sheet of instructions, I am also expected to “record all incidents”, a euphemistic instruction in print that, as it was explained verbally to me, means “get the name of anyone who refuses to leave”. Apparently I am not supposed to club them about the head with my flashlight in an effort to reduce the volume of incident reporting required of me. (Although, again, that is not actually written down. In fact, the “how” mechanics of completing the instruction to “have floor occupants evacuate” seem to be left pretty much to the volunteers.)

So let’s see now… I have the rudiments of a uniform and the authority to stomp around demanding that people get out as quickly as possible, even to seek them out in order to ensure they are told to leave. I can’t quite hurl them from the building, but the whole position and all of its responsibilities, duly assigned and bureaucratically conveyed to us, the volunteers, for some reason ring a vague bell of recollection…

Where have I seen just such a fulfilling and important job portrayed before? Oh yes, I remember…

…

“Resistance is useless!”

“Oh give it a rest,” said Ford. He twisted his head till he was looking straight up into his captor's face. A thought struck him.

“Do you really enjoy this sort of thing?” he asked suddenly.

The Vogon stopped dead and a look of immense stupidity seeped slowly over his face.

“Enjoy?” he boomed. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean,” said Ford, “is does it give you a full satisfying life? Stomping around, shouting, pushing people out of spaceships...”

The Vogon stared up at the low steel ceiling and his eyebrows almost rolled over each other. His mouth slacked. Finally he said, “Well the hours are good...”

“They'd have to be,” agreed Ford.

Arthur twisted his head to look at Ford.

“Ford, what are you doing?” he asked in an amazed whisper.

“Oh, just trying to take an interest in the world around me, OK?” he said. “So the hours are pretty good then?” he resumed.

The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.

“Yeah,” he said, “but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy. Except...” he thought again, which required looking at the ceiling – “except some of the shouting I quite like.” He filled his lungs and bellowed, “Resistance is...”

“Sure, yes,” interrupted Ford hurriedly, “you're good at that, I can tell. But if it's mostly lousy,” he said, slowly giving the words time to reach their mark, “then why do you do it? What is it? The girls? The leather? The machismo? Or do you just find that coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?”

“Er...” said the guard, “er ...\ er ... I dunno. I think I just sort of ... do it really. My aunt said that spaceship guard was a good career for a young Vogon - you know, the uniform, the low-slung stun ray holster, the mindless tedium...”

“There you are Arthur,” said Ford with the air of someone reaching the conclusion of his argument, “you think you've got problems.”

Arthur rather thought he had. Apart from the unpleasant business with his home planet the Vogon guard had half-throttled him already and he didn't like the sound of being thrown into space very much.

“Try and understand his problem,” insisted Ford. “Here he is poor lad, his entire life's work is stamping around, throwing people off spaceships...”

“And shouting,” added the guard.

“And shouting, sure,” said Ford patting the blubbery arm clamped round his neck in friendly condescension, “...and he doesn't even know why he's doing it!”

Arthur agreed this was very sad. He did this with a small feeble gesture, because he was too asphyxicated to speak.

Deep rumblings of bemusement came from the guard.

“Well. Now you put it like that I suppose...”

“Good lad!” encouraged Ford.

“But alright,” went on the rumblings, “so what's the alternative?”

“Well,” said Ford, brightly but slowly, “stop doing it of course! Tell them,” he went on, “you're not going to do it anymore.” He felt he had to add something to that, but for the moment the guard seemed to have his mind occupied pondering that much.

“Eerrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...” said the guard, “erm, well that doesn't sound that great to me.”

Ford suddenly felt the moment slipping away.

“Now wait a minute,” he said, “that's just the start you see, there's more to it than that you see...”

But at that moment the guard renewed his grip and continued his original purpose of lugging his prisoners to the airlock. He was obviously quite touched.

”No, I think if it's all the same to you,'' he said, ``I'd better get you both shoved into this airlock and then go and get on with some other bits of shouting I've got to do.”

It wasn't all the same to Ford Prefect after all.

“Come on now ... but look!” he said, less slowly, less brightly.

“Huhhhhgggggggnnnnnnn ...” said Arthur without any clear inflection.

“But hang on,” pursued Ford, “there's music and art and things to tell you about yet! Arrrggghhh!”

“Resistance is useless,” bellowed the guard, and then added, “You see if I keep it up I can eventually get promoted to Senior Shouting Officer, and there aren't usually many vacancies for non-shouting and non-pushing-people-about officers, so I think I'd better stick to what I know.”
They had now reached the airlock - a large circular steel hatchway of massive strength and weight let into the inner skin of the craft. The guard operated a control and the hatchway swung smoothly open.

“But thanks for taking an interest,” said the Vogon guard. “Bye now.” He flung Ford and Arthur through the hatchway into the small chamber within. Arthur lay panting for breath. Ford scrambled round and flung his shoulder uselessly against the reclosing hatchway.

“But listen,” he shouted to the guard, “there's a whole world you don't know anything about ... here how about this?'' Desperately he grabbed for the only bit of culture he knew offhand - he hummed the first bar of Beethoven's Fifth.

“Da da da dum! Doesn't that stir anything in you?”

“No,'' said the guard, “not really. But I'll mention it to my aunt.”
(A pivotal scene in, of course, “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, by the late, much lamented Douglas Adams)

And finally, for people clamouring for one more illustration of the differences between Britons and Americans (you know who you are!), I will relate the following. (I assume the reader has a passing familiarity with the concept of a television show called “Antiques Roadshow” and might also be aware there has been a US version of the show for some time.)

Recently I was late-night surfing and paused at a segment of the US version where an evaluator was going on and on about what a magnificent specimen of a certain type of desk that a woman had brought in. After the evaluator highlighted all its features, she happily informed the owner she could reasonably expect to receive about $15,000 for it at auction. At this point in the British version of the show, the owner usually gets giddily surprised and registers anything from a “Gasp!” of euphoria to an understated but no less shocked, “Oh my!”

Well in the US version I was watching, the owner promptly moved closer to her desk, pulled open one of its wing doors and proceeded to start arguing with the evaluator based on some online research she’d done which suggested hers was an especially unique version of the desk model in question. The evaluator quietly, but rather firmly, clenched her teeth and waited out the owner’s arguments before essentially repeating her first assessment.

But you could just tell that what she really wanted to say was something like, “Well perhaps you should take the bloody thing to E-Bay and flog it with the 'Special Collector’s Edition' cellphones then, instead of bringing it to a professional!”