Burnout

Harold had never been what most would call a responsible or reliable man. He meant well, he just made bad decisions. Between whiskey and poor choices in women, he had burned the first thirty years of his life away. But it all probably seemed like a good idea at the time. After his thirtieth birthday came and went with the realization that he was going nowhere, Harold decided to take a fourth or fifth stab at getting his life together, and applied for an open position as a security guard. Security was something he had been doing off and on, interspersed with a smattering of menial temp jobs, ever since he failed to graduate from the local technical college. Harold was always a large man, with a torso the general size and shape of an oil drum. He also took orders well, had a high school diploma, was not visibly on drugs, and the company had uniforms that fit him in the back room; Securiqual Guard Services therefore immediately recognized him as exceeding all of their wildest dreams, and hired him on the spot. Details on what exactly Harold would be guarding were scant, which was par for the course in the private security world. His manager shook his hand, wrote down the street address, and told him when to be there to receive his mandatory eight hours of training. Finding the job site was tricky. The address was downtown, which was always a strange and confusing place for Harold, so he left twenty minutes ahead of how long it should have taken him to get there. Despite that, he was still almost five minutes late, because he forgot how difficult it is to find a parking spot downtown. Street spots all required quarters, of which he had none. And parking decks, to a sheltered suburbanite such as himself, seemed to be sprawling labyrinths full of wrong paths and too-narrow tunnels where the slightest misstep meant potential death-by-SUV. In the end he chose the least cyclopean horror of a parking deck he could find, and started walking toward what he believed to be roughly the direction of the building address. At 9:04am, not quite five minutes late for his first day, he found the right place. There was a seven foot tall chain-link fence framing the building's perimeter, with a sliding iron gate serving as its only point of entry or egress. The gate stood open, revealing two unremarkable wooden doors set into the center of a ruddy one-story brick building. The building seemed perhaps as old as he - neither antiquated nor modern, but nestled neatly between the two. The doors led him into a lobby roughly the size of a doctor's waiting area, and adorned similarly. There was a room with a few computers and video monitors jutting awkwardly out from the wall to his left, almost as if the room had been built as an afterthought. There were some tacky red and orange couches in the center of the lobby that looked like they could have been from the disco era, and a receptionist's desk sitting just off to the side of a steel door. Other than four rather impressive brick columns which rose up to the ceiling at the compass points of the lobby, there was little else. Except, of course, for the receptionist. When Harold saw the woman sitting behind the receptionist's desk, he felt that strange lurching feeling in his chest which people usually refer to as their 'heart skipping a beat'. He thought she was perhaps a few years his junior, were it possible to estimate the age of a goddess. Her auburn hair was tied back into a ponytail which had come forward to drape over the front of a shapely shoulder. He remembered a painting that he had to write an essay on for his Art Appreciation class, back in community college. The painting was of this beautiful woman, demurely censoring herself for the audience, standing in a giant clam shell surrounded by some floaty cherub-looking things. He didn't mind writing the paper, because he thought the woman in that painting was absolutely gorgeous. The form and curvature of her body just seemed somehow so perfect, so undeniably right. Femininity personified. He had never seen any woman who resembled the one in