cellio | short takes, including RotK

Note to cat: You are welcome to sleep next to me under the covers. However, if you are going to sleep with claws extended, please orient yourself in a different direction next time.

This morning I got to work to find the door locked. That is, the door is always locked with an electronic lock; we all have cards to get in. Today, though, this was augmented with a physical lock. The landlord's answering service was no help (yay for cell phones, though; at least I could try). Eventually I roused a security guard, who objected that I should go home and spend Christmas with my family instead of working. Projecting? I'm guessing that he drew the short straw and wanted to be home with his family. (Y'know, if they hadn't locked the employee entrance there probably would have been no need for him to be there...) This didn't happen last year, so it took me by surprise. But hey, at least there's heat. (There wasn't at morning services; the furnace broke last night. Oops.)

We saw RotK last night. (High kippah density; not surprising.) I thought the movie was pretty good, especially with the challenge of telling such a big story in three hours. I think they could have found ten minutes to cut to make room for scourging the shire, though.

Individual scenes worked very well; there were places where overall coherence maybe wasn't what would be needed for someone who hasn't read the books. (That might be moot, though; they may be assuming that everyone has read the books, and I can't name a counterexample from my circle of friends.) I'd be interested in hearing reactions from someone who approached the movies cold.

Technically I thought it was very well-done, and from the end credits it looked like they used just about every effects technique in the book. I heard somewhere that about 30 of the horses were real and the rest were CGI -- and that they got the AI "wrong" on the first pass, because the computer-generated horses were refusing to charge the bigger monsters. Don't know if it's true, but I found it funny.

Best Gimli line: "That only counts as one". :-)

We had a suboptimal viewing, unfortunately. We had about five minutes of downtime at about hour 2.5 (in the middle of a scene, so likely not a reel-change screwup). Breakage, maybe? I think we lost a bit when it did come back on, but it was just Sam's pep-talk to Frodo about the shire, so we already had the gist of it. I also noticed a lot of scratches, particularly toward the end -- and this in a copy that's only been in use for a week. I didn't know they were still using film (rather than digital copies), actually, but I can't account for the scratches if it wasn't film.

Tonight we're spending the seventh night of Chanukah with friends at a Chinese restaurant. :-)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

First, you need the human element. What if the person using your pass card was your mugger?

Second, security guards come in four flavors, college students who hope to get a position where they can study and get paid for it, retired widowers who don't have family to go home to and took the job more to relieve the boredom than to supplement their social security, cop wannabes who can't make the cut and social misfits who couldn't get a job in a burger joint because of their complete lack of people skills. The latter two are not mutually exclusive.

Getting someone to fill a time and a half shift isn't that difficult. See categories #2 & #4 above. It's supposed to be easy pay because there's no one in the building. You lock all the doors, turn on all the silent alarms and break out the paperback until it's time to do your rounds. With one employee in the building, the job becomes much harder. First, he can't set the silent alarms, second he now has to worry about a potential troublemaker in the building... you! Most sabotage, espionage, and supply thefts are done by disgruntled employees, not break-ins. This is a large part of security guard training, what to watch for in employees.

And forgive me for this, you don't profile correctly. You say you want to work on Christmas because you're Jewish? With a surname like Cellio? Isn't that Italian? And aren't most Italians Catholics? And you don't 'look Jewish' either. He may not say any of this to you, but I'd guarantee he thought it. If I were in his shoes, I'd be keeping an eye on you... just in case. Sorry, but it's true. :( Even security guards profile.

The odd (and in retrospect, sad) thing was that he didn't ask me for any ID or anything. He asked me where I work and I told him; I offered him my card and the key to our office to verify that I wasn't some kook off the street (or someone with a fake card) but he wasn't interested. He never asked my name. And I didn't actually say I was Jewish; I just said "not my holiday" or words to that effect. I could just as easily have been pagan, or athiest.

I hadn't considered that the difference between zero people and one person in the building would be so significant. I was able to leave through the employee entrance, so if I had been inclined to steal all our computers nothing would have stopped me. (He was probably supposed to make me sign in, at least. Hmm. Should mention that to our speaker-to-landlords.)

Sorry, but it's true. :( Even security guards profile.

I don't actually have a problem with that. I want the security guard to use his brain to evaluate situations -- just so long as legitimate discrimination doesn't spill over into bigotry.

By the way, the landlord was informed in advance that someone from our company would be working that day, because our HR person said so while confirming that there would be heat. So they could have checked my name against a list or something, but it sounds like they didn't have a list.

Sounds like the landlord might need to revamp his security procedures.

There's *got* to be a list! When I worked security at Rich Products, I was overwhelmed with lists. I had lists of employees (multiple copies actually, I could look someone up by Name, ID #, or Parking Tag), lists of vendors (non-employees who were allowed in), we even had a list of all the artwork in the building along with it's location and insured value. I used it like a self-tour of an art museum. "You paid $28,000 for a blank canvas with one red stripe on it? Do you like blue?" My favorite was the one outside the bakery testing lab, a plaster sculpture of a cartoon frog drowning in a sea of doughnuts. I never understood the deep meaning, if one existed, I just thought it was cute! :D

short takes, including RotK

Security Guards (from one who's been there)

Re: Security Guards (from one who's been there)

one more bit of data

Re: one more bit of data