Eleven checkpoints, a wand that reads them, and a log nobody can edit, which exists so a guard cannot claim a patrol he did not walk. Mine says I scanned point 11 at a time I was four hundred metres away at point 4.
I am a security officer on a factory site. Two miles of perimeter fence, four buildings, eleven checkpoints, and I walk the tour four times a night.
The system is the point of this so I will be thorough.
At each checkpoint there is a steel button the size of a five pence piece, bolted to a wall, with a unique number in it. I carry a wand. You touch the wand to the button and it records the button's number and the time from its own clock.
The wand is sealed. It has no keypad and no screen and no way to put anything into it except by touching a button. At the end of the shift you dock it in a reader in the gatehouse and it uploads, and the upload is what my employer and the client both see.
You cannot edit it. That is the entire reason it exists. Before these, a guard wrote a patrol sheet and a guard could write anything, and the insurance industry got tired of paying out on patrols that never happened.
So the log is not my account of my night. It is the only account, and if it and I disagree, it wins.
Point 11 is on the far side of the site, at the back of the old mill building, which is not in use and which is kept locked.
Nineteen times in four years, the log has me scanning point 11 at a time when I was somewhere else.
The most recent was in the February. The log reads:
02:14 point 3 02:19 point 4 02:21 point 11 02:26 point 5 02:31 point 6
Point 4 to point 11 is four hundred and ten metres across a yard with two gates in it. Point 11 back to point 5 is about the same. Two minutes for eight hundred metres.
And I was at point 4 at nineteen past and point 5 at twenty six past, and I walked from one to the other the way I have walked it every night for four years, which takes seven minutes and passes nowhere near the mill.
What the obvious answers are, and what happened to them.
A clock drift on the wand. I wanted this one. If the wand's clock wandered, a scan could land at the wrong time.
Two things. The wand syncs its clock every time it docks, and the upload records the drift, which is logged and has never been more than a second or two. And a drift would move an entry, it would not insert one: my other scans that night are all where they should be, in sequence, at the right intervals.
A duplicate button. Two buttons with the same number would mean a scan somewhere near my route that reads as 11. The buttons are unique by design, sixty four bits of it, and the site has eleven of them and I have been round with the wand touching every one and each reads its own number.
Somebody else scanning point 11. This is the serious one and I took it to my manager in 2022 as an accusation, because there are three of us on rotation.
It cannot be done. There is one wand and I have it, docked in a reader in the gatehouse and signed for at the start of every shift. The log is per wand. A second wand would upload as a second tour.
My manager did something useful with it, which I want to record, because security companies do not usually.
He asked the client for the CCTV.
The yard by the mill has a camera on a pole, and in 2022 we pulled the footage for four of the nights on my list, at the minute the log says point 11 was scanned.
Three of the four show an empty yard. You can see the corner of the mill and the wall the button is on.
The fourth shows me.
I have watched it perhaps thirty times.
It is me. I am wearing the coat I wear, I have the torch in my left hand the way I hold it, and I walk into frame from the gate end, go to the wall, put my right hand flat against it at about the right height for a scan, hold it there for two or three seconds, and walk back out the way I came.
The footage has a timestamp on it, burned in by the client's own system, and the timestamp is the minute the log says.
At that minute I was at point 4, which is four hundred metres away behind two buildings, and I know that because point 4 is the door of the boiler house and I was standing in it out of the rain, and I remember that night because it was the night the rain came in sideways and I had to dry my radio on the gatehouse heater.
I remember drying the radio. I do not remember the mill.
What I have done since.
My manager's conclusion, written down, is that the events are a system fault and that no disciplinary inference is to be drawn, which is a decent thing to have in a file, and he retired in 2023 and I do not think the current one has read it.
The tour is unchanged. Eleven points, four times a night. I am not going to stop walking a patrol because of a log.
What I do differently is small. At point 4 I used to stand in the boiler house doorway for a minute or two, out of the weather, because nobody is going to begrudge a man that.
I do not stop there any more. I scan and I keep moving, and I get to point 5 in five minutes instead of seven, and the log shows it.
The nineteen are all on nights where the gap between point 4 and point 5 was seven minutes or more.
There has not been one since I stopped standing in the doorway, which is two years, and I am aware of what that sounds like, and I have worked out that I do not care how it sounds as long as it stays at nineteen.