"Mall-ninjas", and smacking a co-worker upside the head.
Yeah, I did. The smacking upside the head thing, I mean-- and I'm very embarrassed.
Our newest investigator in Internal Affairs heard me come in the office front door yesterday morning, and thought it would be funny as hell to hide around the corner, and scare me by jumping out and going "yah!" or somesuch.
I was woolgathering, and not paying attention to what was going on around me. When she leaped out at me with the "yah" mojo going, it startled the hell out of me-- and I counterattacked whatever was jumping and 'yah"-ing. I didn't think. Fortunately, being young and possessed of good reflexes, she ducked back as I hit, and instead of hitting her in the throat, I clipped her a good one in the face instead. She laughed. This is apparantly something she has done a lot of in the past to others, and she's never had anyone who responded like I did. Novelty has a lot to lend itself, even when being smacked in the face, it seems.
I was mortified. Hugely embarrassed. Had I not been wandering thru the office with my head in the clouds and my thumb figuratively up my ass, I wouldn't have have hit her at all.
"Why" you ask, "would you be embarrassed of responding to an ambush in the manner that long training and experience has engrained into you?"
This is where the "mall ninja" thing comes in. What is a "mall ninja"?
These are (usually) guys, who have an obsessive need to constantly broadcast to all and sundry just how high-speed and low-drag they are. They are inevitably masters of whatever Deadly Martial Art Fad is currently all the rage, they talk incessantly of the violent confrontations they are constantly "forced" into that require them to display said Deadly Martial Art, they claim intimate connection with (if not actual members or veterans of) any number of special operations organizations, these connections granting them-- seemingly thru osmosis-- massive expertise in all aspects of the craft of doing harm to one's fellow man. Lots of them are gun and gear geeks of the first water as well.
You find a lot of these guys working as security guards in malls-- hence the "mall-ninja" title.
If Life's vagaries have resulted in one actually acquiring some of the background claimed by mall-ninjas, finding any similarity at all between yourself and the Corps of Mall Ninjas is a painful, horrid thing. To avoid this , most of us will go to great lengths-- the most common measure taken is not to talk openly about what one does, or has done, except to friends who won't put you in the same boat as Them. I've found that when I was a patrol cop, it was easier to talk about the things I saw and did-- they made for vastly entertaining adventure stories for my friends. As I've progressed up the food chain of the hands-on side of my profession, I've noticed myself becoming less and less inclined to talk about what I have done, and the things I can do. I'm noticing this even as I write this entry-- I feel a strong inclination towards just deleting what I've written, and forgetting the whole thing.
So after I retreated to my office after repeated apologies to my co-worker, I sat down and took stock of the who that I am today, compared to the who I was almost twenty years ago, when I began doing what I do. This taking-stock was more in the vein of "what goofy shit do I do that manifests itself on the surface, as could be interpreted by the casual observer as symptomatic of being a mall-ninja?" Reacting to someone popping out and going "yah" in a nice, safe office by instantly trying to smash their larynx probably meets that criteria, IMO.
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I listed stuff, but I came back later and edited them out.. I already feel like a goddamn mall ninja for even bringing the subject up.
It has occurred to me that perhaps the crux of the issue of "not inclined to talk much about it" is that it sounds... well, melodramatic, you know? Horseshit. Like you're pulling the long bow for effect, exaggerating for the crowd.
For example:
I think I've finally broken my wife of her habit of coming up on me unawares and goosing me, after all these years. No, I've never hit her in reaction, but I think she finally accepted my explanation of how I react to it: I go into "combat overdrive"-- my heartrate and BP spikes, my respiration drops into "tactical breathing" mode, I tense up and I prepare to be hurt while I look for targets myself. It's miserable, very hard on the body and it takes as long as 20 minutes to stand down from-- I have to be in an intensely focused bad mood to deliberately hurt people, and the mood lingers long after the "all-clear" has sounded there are no people needing to be hurt. That's what I mean by "melodramatic-sounding." It drove me nuts that she would (quite reasonably) discount my explanation of why I objected to being goosed as being silly. I say "quite reasonably", because I realize that people like me are sort of thin on the ground, and trying to explain myself does sound like mall-ninja BS.
I'll leave this to simmer on the computer for a while, and meditate on whether I'll post it.
Conversely, maybe I ought to treat this like jumping into cold water, and just leap.
Our newest investigator in Internal Affairs heard me come in the office front door yesterday morning, and thought it would be funny as hell to hide around the corner, and scare me by jumping out and going "yah!" or somesuch.
I was woolgathering, and not paying attention to what was going on around me. When she leaped out at me with the "yah" mojo going, it startled the hell out of me-- and I counterattacked whatever was jumping and 'yah"-ing. I didn't think. Fortunately, being young and possessed of good reflexes, she ducked back as I hit, and instead of hitting her in the throat, I clipped her a good one in the face instead. She laughed. This is apparantly something she has done a lot of in the past to others, and she's never had anyone who responded like I did. Novelty has a lot to lend itself, even when being smacked in the face, it seems.
I was mortified. Hugely embarrassed. Had I not been wandering thru the office with my head in the clouds and my thumb figuratively up my ass, I wouldn't have have hit her at all.
"Why" you ask, "would you be embarrassed of responding to an ambush in the manner that long training and experience has engrained into you?"
This is where the "mall ninja" thing comes in. What is a "mall ninja"?
These are (usually) guys, who have an obsessive need to constantly broadcast to all and sundry just how high-speed and low-drag they are. They are inevitably masters of whatever Deadly Martial Art Fad is currently all the rage, they talk incessantly of the violent confrontations they are constantly "forced" into that require them to display said Deadly Martial Art, they claim intimate connection with (if not actual members or veterans of) any number of special operations organizations, these connections granting them-- seemingly thru osmosis-- massive expertise in all aspects of the craft of doing harm to one's fellow man. Lots of them are gun and gear geeks of the first water as well.
You find a lot of these guys working as security guards in malls-- hence the "mall-ninja" title.
If Life's vagaries have resulted in one actually acquiring some of the background claimed by mall-ninjas, finding any similarity at all between yourself and the Corps of Mall Ninjas is a painful, horrid thing. To avoid this , most of us will go to great lengths-- the most common measure taken is not to talk openly about what one does, or has done, except to friends who won't put you in the same boat as Them. I've found that when I was a patrol cop, it was easier to talk about the things I saw and did-- they made for vastly entertaining adventure stories for my friends. As I've progressed up the food chain of the hands-on side of my profession, I've noticed myself becoming less and less inclined to talk about what I have done, and the things I can do. I'm noticing this even as I write this entry-- I feel a strong inclination towards just deleting what I've written, and forgetting the whole thing.
So after I retreated to my office after repeated apologies to my co-worker, I sat down and took stock of the who that I am today, compared to the who I was almost twenty years ago, when I began doing what I do. This taking-stock was more in the vein of "what goofy shit do I do that manifests itself on the surface, as could be interpreted by the casual observer as symptomatic of being a mall-ninja?" Reacting to someone popping out and going "yah" in a nice, safe office by instantly trying to smash their larynx probably meets that criteria, IMO.
*****************************************************************
I listed stuff, but I came back later and edited them out.. I already feel like a goddamn mall ninja for even bringing the subject up.
It has occurred to me that perhaps the crux of the issue of "not inclined to talk much about it" is that it sounds... well, melodramatic, you know? Horseshit. Like you're pulling the long bow for effect, exaggerating for the crowd.
For example:
I think I've finally broken my wife of her habit of coming up on me unawares and goosing me, after all these years. No, I've never hit her in reaction, but I think she finally accepted my explanation of how I react to it: I go into "combat overdrive"-- my heartrate and BP spikes, my respiration drops into "tactical breathing" mode, I tense up and I prepare to be hurt while I look for targets myself. It's miserable, very hard on the body and it takes as long as 20 minutes to stand down from-- I have to be in an intensely focused bad mood to deliberately hurt people, and the mood lingers long after the "all-clear" has sounded there are no people needing to be hurt. That's what I mean by "melodramatic-sounding." It drove me nuts that she would (quite reasonably) discount my explanation of why I objected to being goosed as being silly. I say "quite reasonably", because I realize that people like me are sort of thin on the ground, and trying to explain myself does sound like mall-ninja BS.
I'll leave this to simmer on the computer for a while, and meditate on whether I'll post it.
Conversely, maybe I ought to treat this like jumping into cold water, and just leap.