We all know that most waiters and waitresses are out of work
actors; well, it’s the same with us black-suited, earpiece-wearing, Ray Ban-adorned secret service agents.
We stand in close
proximity to our charges, talking into our cuffs (for no good reason, it turns
out), pressing an index finger into an ear (the one with the curly wire dangling
out of it), always on the lookout for what concerns us most: glass-fronted
buildings. Once we have identified such a building we walk past it slowly,
faces impassive, carrying out the most important part of our jobs: checking
that we are looking sufficiently secret-service-y
in our costumes.
People are happy to
buy into the myth of “secret agents”. This is despite the truth that there is
no major threat to the Royal Families, Presidents or celeb VIPs of this world.
However, such people don’t feel important or special enough unless they live
inside a bubble of perpetual paranoia where every crowd has a lone gunman,
every smiling well-wisher is a potential assassin, and they, by virtue of their
extreme importance, are the target.
“But what about
JFK?” I hear you ask. Yes, well, what people don’t know is that he’d eaten a
hand-grenade salad for lunch and, instead of exploding harmlessly inside his
bomb-proof arse, JFK accidentally sneezed (he was allergic to Texans) sending
his Fabergé hand grenade straight
up to his cerebellum where it got lodged in a memory about tight dresses, and
exploded.
The official
coroner’s verdict was “death by hand-grenade salad misadventure”, but all of
the actors in the Secret Service Actors Guild thought that it would be much
better for business if we pretended that he’d been shot.
Next Week: Confessions
of a Sniffer Dog
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