Loads of people have their Decembers ruined by having to work Christmas. Very few of them, however, get to be Christmas: Father Christmas, that is.
The security manager approached Big Rich with a brown sack. “You’ve already got a beard and you’re big,” he said, brushing the dust off the white bits on the suit. “The staff kids’ party: you’re Santa.” Unfortunately, Santa was partial to Aldi black whisky, but no one seemed to notice.
December is a weird time on campus. Some staff – we call them the Witnesses – clearly don’t celebrate Christmas and try to get in even when the place is shuttered. One Boxing Day, our sixth episode of Dad’s Army was interrupted by a head over the gate screaming “Karate!”. It was a sports technician whose club met every Wednesday, and he wasn’t going to let the fact he was the only one here interrupt his bunkai.
Normally, the last people we see are the university facilities staff we have to run back from their annual Italian. They give us duff directions, then insist on stopping for a wazz down an unlit country track. We looked after a chef one year who stabbed himself by accident while preparing the academic buffet. We had to stick him in a taxi with one hand pointing up – everyone who passed him looked heavenwards.
In previous years, students were sent home over Christmas, but now they’re allowed to stay on in halls. The downside for us is that this means some security have to stick around on the 25th. The plus side is the fun of finding blokes crashed out in hedges smelling of mulled wine, their Batman Converse sticking out of the foliage.
Spending their first Christmas away from home seems to send some kids round the bend. One December, two girls dashed in and began punching each other in front of our information desk. We managed to chase the aggressor out while the survivor phoned a friend.
Another kid tried to throw a snowball at his beloved’s window but overshot, and pushed the whole pane through. His girlfriend ended up spending her evening with the on-call carpenter.
As the last car pulls out, leaving just us and the screens, you put your paper crowns on and cross your fingers. If something breaks or starts buzzing during the festivities, the odds of getting help are not good.
A typical nightmare: it’s the night before Christmas, and not a creature’s stirring except the student reporting water coming through his lounge ceiling. You go to the room upstairs: there’s water coming through that ceiling too. It’s pouring down from the loft, litres of it.
As you run to the nearest office block looking for bins to save the carpets, a fire alarm starts howling. Water’s hit the detector heads. The students immediately start evacuating (why can’t they do this during drills?) Then your phone chirps: it’s the monitoring station. Do you want the brigade out? No, you tell them, it’s OK. You’re not interrupting someone else’s viewing of Die Hard.
You get the kids into a car park, silence the alarm and phone a plumber, with a cast iron guarantee of sausage rolls. The plumber turns up and fixes the leak. You give the kids your Quality Street, open the windows to dry the carpets, and beg everyone to walk around shooting the detector heads with hair dryers. When the dripping finally stops, you go back to your chair and put Gremlins on.
On Christmas morning itself, we stick our heads in the chapel and find that the manger is now home to a second-year who couldn’t find his way home last night.
On the way back, instead of robins and sleigh bells, we find a kid face down in frost and piss. His chest’s moving, so we exhale, then gently wake him up. The smell of Bailey’s hits us like tear gas. He’s been using his ID card as a pillow.
We walk him back to his bedroom; he apologises all the way. We tell him he doesn’t need to. He just needs to have fun and take care. Merry Christmas.
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