Security Work

While I was at Radio Shack,the full time job that I had at Fantle's drug store came to an end, and I had to look for another full time job.A friend of mine, Edie, informed me about a Security company that was hiring around the Silver Spring area.The name of the company was "Burns' Security".The place had quite a few Africans working there, mostly Cameroonians.I applied for the job in Vienna, Virginia and after being hired, was send to the Silver Spring location to begin duty.Edie, Nick,Nambeke Edward, Ernest, to name just a few were some of the names of the guys that worked at the company.There were various working shifts, including the 11pm to 7am shift, the 7am to 3pm shift and lastly the 3pm to 11pm shift.Our immediate boss was Ernest, a friend of all of us, so you could pick and worked on what schedule is convenient to you.Most of us either had a second job, or were attending school.The pay was really excellent and the work involved very little stress.You could also get over time duty which pays you time and a half.I had accumulated quite a few credit cards from my schooling during this period and the extra income that I was getting from the security job did help a lot in paying down my debts.The job involved a lot of sitting around also, so most of the time it was convenient to bring in a book and do some reading.In terms of the actual duty, you hard to go around each floor of three big buildings and make sure that everything was secured.Downtown Silver Spring, where we stood guard is quite a pleasant sight.The Silver Spring metro station is just to the right of our location and there were good looking apartment complexes all around the area.A lot of businesses had their offices in the building.American Express was in the building, so was Comcast Cable, Merrill Lynch and a commercial bank.It was a place to make contact for some future appointments.My work at this place ended for some reasons that I still cannot figure out up till today.We had already being hired, worked for about six months, and right out of the blue the company said we were to go through a security back ground check.Remember, this was way before 9/11 was to occur.I had a strong feeling that one of the main office supervisors, who stopped by once in a while did not enjoy my working at the place. I received bad news that I did not pass a security clearance check.I could not think of anything that I could have done that would make me fail a security check.Anyway, I had other issues that prevented me from fighting.I was to passed various background checks in the future. I left Burns Security and had to get by with the part time job at Radio Shack for a long period of time.My income felt drastically and my credit card bills began to mount.I tried in vain to land another job, but it proved to be very difficult.