Security guards? Security against what?
I develop a wry smile every time I am confronted by a serious-looking security guard with a broken pen and a worthless form on a dirty clipboard.
I walk into the office of the unemployment department and who stop me at the door? THREE security people. One sits, one stands and one indicates grumpily that I must complete the dirty form on the clipboard.
I drive through the gate at a local newspaper and am greeted by NOBODY. Usually the security guard greets me with his clipboard with the worthless forms, but today a cold wind blows at a blistering speed – and suddenly security is not a prime concern any more.
Over the weekend, we visited a family member in a hospital in Pretoria. On Friday the security guard handed us a slip with (empty) spaces for a vehicle registration number and your personal particulars and collected it (uncompleted) when we left. On Saturday morning he let us through without asking any information or handing out any pieces of paper. On Saturday afternoon, we had to queue behind 5 cars to wait for him to complete a slip for each vehicle.
You will not enter a South African government department building without a serious contingent of security guards who collect your info but don’t know (and don’t care) if you enter your brother’s information or a fake ID number.
Creating work is one thing. Wasting resources and people’s time is another.
Either we take it seriously and decide what information we need to reach whatever goal we have with this ridiculous exercise, we train the guards properly, make sure they understand why we need the information, process the info to serve whatever purpose we have for it and do not use more guards than is necessary.
But what we are doing now is employing unproductive people to do an incomprehensible task with deficient tools to reach an objective that no-one really understands. If you want access control, there is no need for a security guard, you can use a doorman with a worthless form. If you want security, the question is: security from what? And should the guards then not be trained and armed?
We should not only stop this nonsense, we should reconsider whatever we do to see if it passes the tests of logic and necessity. If it is not logic and not necessary, then we should stop doing it.
And it should be the same in our private lives.