Picture this. You're outside the doors of the MTV Awards. Music and movie stars file past you in their TV-ready glitter. Then your hero shows. You lurch forward in an effort to get an autograph. But wait! You can't do that. You're on security! Oh, well. At least you caught a glimpse.
Fantasy? Not for Michael Coady. This California security officer has been hired to cover a few high-profile shindigs, from the MTV Awards to the People's Choice Awards. The thrill is just being there, and it's tough to keep your cool in the midst of all that glamour.
"The thing is, you're supposed to be watching out for these people. Asking for an autograph just isn't right. Some [stars] are willing to talk to you, but others don't want to know."
Coady works for a Los Angeles security agency. While he gets the Hollywood-style gigs every once in a while, most of his work is with a high-powered defense company.
Coady entered the business when he was 18. It was around that time that Frank Sinatra's manager yelled at him. The year was 1980 and the people in charge of President Ronald Reagan's inauguration needed as many security officers as possible. Coady jumped at the job and ended up on one of the doors while the entertainers were rehearsing.
"I worked all through the preparation, checked press passes and monitored people's access to the area," Coady says.
Things got tense and, out of the blue, Sinatra's manager came up and yelled at him. It was an odd situation and Coady can't even remember what the problem was. But being there left its mark. "It was fun and it was an honor to do it," he says with a laugh.
Coady views security as a service profession -- not a license to play cop. There's no room for egos in this business. In his work, he has to maintain the respect of engineers and others. A pushy attitude doesn't help.
But there are tense times, too. "[At my company] there's a lot of work in national security, and you have to make sure no one goes out the door with any secrets."
An increasing number of companies around the country are threatened with workplace violence. Coady says it's a situation he's familiar with.
"We had one employee threaten another. I had to clear the area of people without alarming them that there was someone here with a gun. Finally, we got the guy arrested and on the ground."
There are also lots of long hours and a lot of time spent doing routine checks, but every day remains different. Coady likes the fact that he's always interacting with people.
"You need a good sense of humor in this business. You can't take yourself too seriously. But at the same time, you can't freak out if anything happens. You've got to be in control of the situation."
Coady and other security officers say one of the primary qualities is good communication. A tense situation can quickly build if you don't have the skills to diffuse anger.
"You have people yelling, screaming at you....You can't let it escalate," he says.
Sylvia MacKenzie agrees. She's part of the security staff at a department store and also works on contract as a security officer for another company. Aggressive confrontation is just about the last tactic she uses when approaching shoplifters in the department store.
"In the beginning, I got into quite a few fights, tumbles," says MacKenzie, a 30-year veteran in the security field. "I didn't know how to communicate."
Now she also has to deal with the unknown factor -- sometimes junkies come into the store looking for a quick item to lift and make a few bucks. Those situations are both dangerous and require skillful maneuvering.
"In cases like that, you're never really sure what's going to happen. It can cause quite a bit of anxiety."
Alex Padovan works in another environment altogether -- a university.
Along with unlocking doors for locked out professors, Padovan checks rooms, validates parking and even date-stamps essays turned in after hours. But it's also his job to monitor specialized equipment against theft.
That probably brought about the strangest situation in Padovan's seven years at the university. One day, about $15,000 worth of equipment was stolen from the university. While the police were investigating the theft, Padovan received an anonymous phone call from a man who seemed to know something about the theft. The man insisted they give each other code names.
"It started getting a little X-File-ish," Padovan says, laughing. "He said, 'I don't want any names. I'll take a number and you take a number.'"
Padovan encouraged him to talk, and over time gained his confidence. One night, he was at home when the phone rang. Another security officer from the university was on the line saying the caller had phoned again and wanted to spill the beans. Trouble was, he also wanted to meet Padovan. He agreed to meet the man at a local restaurant.
"I brought my ID, but I didn't know what he looked like or what his name was. But then I got to the restaurant, this man got up and said, 'You're number one.' And I said, 'Yup.'"
Padovan got the information he needed to pass on to the police, right down to the names of every one of the culprits. The next morning all the stolen items reappeared on campus.
"You really need the people skills or negotiating skills for this job," he says. "Mediating difficult situations is what we have to do most of the time."
Padovan borrows heavily from his background in sociology. He believes you should learn the culture of whatever group you are protecting, which in his case includes the diversity of a university population.
"For instance, if you have someone from Communist China and you ask them to kneel down, cross their ankles and put their hands over their head -- the common arrest procedure -- that's their execution position and you might inadvertently escalate the situation," he says. "You have to interact with these people and in some cases arrest these people, so it's important to be aware of certain cultures."
While Padovan enjoys his work, he still finds that the old stereotype lingers. Efforts to make the business more professional are slowly whittling that away, but Padovan and others feel there's still a ways to go.
"People have a lack of understanding about what we do. You don't just go into [the] situation and expect to be a cop. You've got to stop and look and listen -- really listen -- because that's what most people need."