A roller shutter has a rubber safety edge along the bottom that stops it and sends it back up if it touches anything, because a shutter that does not stop will crush a person. Ours comes down at midnight on an empty entrance. At two the safety edge touches something, at about the height of a shoulder, and the shutter goes back up, and the entrance camera shows it open and nothing under it, and then the count on the ground floor is one.
I am the night security officer for a multi storey car park and the shutter is the only thing between the building and the street after midnight.
The shutter.
Steel, full width of the entrance, comes down at midnight on a timer. Along the bottom edge is a rubber strip with a switch inside it, the safety edge, and if the strip touches anything on the way down the shutter stops and goes back up, and tries again after thirty seconds. It is there so the shutter cannot close on a person, and it is tested weekly, by me, with a broom.
At two every night it comes back up.
The log.
The shutter controller logs every movement. Midnight, close, complete. Two, obstruction detected, reverse, open. Two and thirty seconds, close, obstruction detected, reverse, open. It does that a few times. Then close, complete.
The obstruction is detected at a height. The controller knows how far down the shutter was when the edge hit, and it was about a metre and a half off the ground, which is the height of a shoulder on a person of about my size standing under it.
It hits a shoulder and goes up and tries again and hits the shoulder again, and then the shoulder is not there and it closes, and the count on the ground floor, which was zero, is one.
What has been checked.
The edge, replaced. The controller, replaced. The entrance camera, which sees the shutter from outside and shows it come down, stop, go up, nothing under it, come down, stop, go up, nothing, and close, and the street empty the whole time.
The ground floor, by me, after. Empty. The count reads one. Nothing on the cameras. Whatever the shutter let in is in the building, on the ground floor, and the ground floor is forty bays and six pillars and a lift lobby, and I have walked it with a torch, and the count reads one, and at about six it reads zero, and the shutter log says nothing about how it left.
The edge.
I stood under the shutter one night, at two, to one side, with the camera on my phone.
It came down. It stopped at a metre and a half, a foot from me, on something. The rubber strip compressed in one place, the way it compresses on a broom, in a shape the width of a shoulder. The shutter went up. I put my hand out, into the place where the shoulder had been, and the air there was cold and the cold had a shape, and the shape moved, past me, in, and the shutter came down behind it and touched nothing and closed, and I was inside with it.
I went to the booth and locked the door. The count was one. I did not walk the floor that night.
Who comes in.
I do not know. I think it is somebody who walks home this way, or did, and the car park was their short cut, and the shutter was not there when they used it, and they are not in a state to notice that it is. The shutter notices. That is what it is for.
What is done about it.
The two o'clock opening is on the shutter log as an obstruction event and the contractor has tested the edge and found it working, which it is, which is the point, and the ground floor count is logged as a loop fault, and nobody has put the two logs side by side but me.
What I do.
I sit in the booth until six.
I have stopped locking the door. Whatever comes in at two does not come to the booth. It crosses the ground floor, on the loop counts, in a straight line, from the shutter to the far corner, where there is a door to the street on the other side that has been locked for years, and it waits there, and at six, when the shutter opens for the day, the count goes to zero, and I think it goes back out the way it came, having not got through.
I have asked the council to unlock that door. Fire exit, I said. They are looking into it. If they do, I think the count will go to zero at two instead of six, and I think that will be the end of it, and I will miss it, a little, because the shutter stopping for it every night, that careful stop, the strip compressing on a shoulder, and then lifting to let it through, is the nearest thing I have seen to manners in this building.