Nothing can make an idiot feel quite as authoritative as handing him a walkie-talkie. Especially if it comes with one of those little cop-handsets that clips onto the shoulder. Combines the allure of being a cop with the ability to pretend you're using a communicator from Star Trek. That isn't even getting into the whole secret code aspect of the police designations we ripped off and used over the radio. This went way beyond 10-4, shit, we had a whole book of codes. We didn't take a shit, we went code eight. We didn't get phone calls, we got a 10-21. We didn't arrive anywhere, we were 10-97. We didn't catch catch kids smoking pot, we 10-16'd a WMJ for 11357 in beta structure.
Radio code was what elevated us above the rest of the mall, see. If you knew enough of it you could have whole conversations in it - albeit, only conversations about taking a shit or chasing mallrats, but still. It sounded pretty awesome coming over the radio too. Always impressed the fuck out of customers when they heard us babbling.
Like every bunch of twenty-something dudes we had our own set of slang to go along with it. Most of it was only funny as an in-joke, but some of it was invented radio code to keep the bosses from knowing what the fuck we were on about. Carnell earned a bit of notoriety in his invention of 3-S and his casual insertion of it any time he could;
Me: "Complainant advises suspect was white-female-juvenile in white t-shirt"
Carnell: "10-4. Please advise if suspect is 3-S."
Me: "Unknown. Be advised, suspect is approximately fourteen."
Carnell: "Ask the complainant for me."
3-S stood for the 3 S's. Single, Straight, Screwable. It was our shorthand for letting one another know the status of any particular female. Started out as 2-S, but after I managed to make a fool of myself trying to flirt with the cute butch girl assistant manager at Hot Topic we added the straight bit.
"11-53 Beta Structure" meant "go look around the smaller parking structure" but after enough use it meant "come meet me for a cigarette" because nothing ever actually happened in beta structure except for cartsurfing and occasionally catching teenagers fucking or smoking pot. Ended up being a favorite spot for some of the guys to bring dates. Accrued a pretty nice collection of empty beer cans until it got cleaned out right before Christmas. Got a bit nasty when some of the guys would just toss their used condoms off the side of the building. Rotten latex hanging off the bushes. I did not envy the poor fucking groundskeepers when they had to clean that up.
You get used to carrying a radio at your hip after a while. Sometimes on a quiet night you'd forget it was there until it squawked at you and scared the living shit out of you. Worst was the emergency line - you could dial in from any phone and ring our radios directly. Whole conversation would happen on the air. Meant everyone was fucked for talking if some idiot called up and wouldn't shut up. The ring was pretty nasty too. Best use we ever found for it was TJ figuring out how to dial out on it and ordering a pizza when we were stuck working a graveyard together.
Radios came with a page button too. Push it, and everyone would hear a squelch. For maximum annoyance value, you could hold the button down and every radio in the mall would make a delightful screeching sound. Mostly used just to be an asshole. Nice thing was, the page button was right next to the talk button, so saying "wrong button, sorry" was always a viable excuse.
We had twenty channels but only used one, officially. Supervisors liked to switch to a seperate channel when they needed to have an extended conversation, and everybody used the empty channels to bullshit when we thought it was safe.
Carnell was the first one to figure out that some of the higher channels overlapped with the sort of walkie-talkies Radioshack sold. He bought his fuckbuddy one. Sometimes if you got lucky flipping through the channels you'd hear them talking. Usually best to skip over it, unless you wanted to hear static-y voices talking about fucking in parking structures...
No comments:
Post a Comment