baronessekat | If you do your job right (Reply)

Every year I go to war. I do not don the armor, I do not take up the bow, I do not bring the blade. But to war I still go.

I take my place amongst the supporters. I do not cheer the blue or rally behind the red. Instead I help to make it so that the war can continue peacefully. If I and my fellows have done things right, you will never have known that anything was done at all. I take pride in the years that no one realizes that there may have been trouble on my watch.

See, I work on the staff of the event. For 15 years I have served as one of the heads of Public Safety (or Security, or the Neighborhood Watch, depending on what year it was and what new title the department was going by). Some years it was easier to let the Known World think that all ran smoothly. Our "Friends from Butler" only had to come on site to serve some papers or just stopped in to say hello to whoever the Liaison was as they had not seen each other in a year. In a tent city with a population of over ten thousand people, statistics say that something will happen. And when it does, I and my fellows are there to take the situation in hand.

Some years, we're lucky enough that the disoriented nude woman was just sleep walking and not a victim of something else. That the lost child was just a 4 year old who really had to go to the potty and mom was taking too long to get up and walk with them, so they went themselves and got a little lost trying to find their way back to camp. That the husband took the wallet to go buy a pretty and didn't tell the wife so she thought they had been robbed.

Sometimes I share the humorous stories from my shifts. The story of the hand puppet that came in to report that some strange woman was following him around (aka his operator). The tale of the Fencers from Colorado who climbed to the top of a stave church to put a pink flamingo at the top of the steeple. The missing man with the green glowing butt.

But there are stories I could share that would make you stop and blink at me and question why I do what I do. But I do not share those stories. Sometimes I do not because legally I cannot. The situation is under investigation by authorities. Sometimes I do not, because the dignity of an individual should not be dragged into the public light. Sometimes I do not because I do not want to ruin your war experience by bringing reality crashing in.

I do not need to share with you what it was like to investigate a dummy hanging in a tree to discover that someone had instead taken their life. I do not need to share with you what it's like being the only female on staff so always being the one called in to hold a woman's hand when she reports an assault. I do not need to share what it's like to talk down someone who has had too much to drink and stopped taking their medication so they are wandering their camp with an axe trying to chase away the monsters. I do not tell you the heartache caused when you have to escort the police to a camp so that they can deliver a death notification. You do not need to know that stuff.

So I come off my 12 hour shift, I may look tired and stressed, and I just smile and say it was a long night.

So, please, go back out, enjoy your vacation. That's what vacations are for. I will stand guard and help make is so that you never know what really happens. And no thank yous are necessary. It's just what I do on my vacation.