Why Is Anyone Surprised?

Video of Sleeping Guards Shakes Nuclear Industry

Kerry Beal was taken aback when he discovered last March that many of his fellow security guards at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania were taking regular naps in what they called “the ready room.”

When he spoke to supervisors at his company, Wackenhut Corp., they told Beal to be a team player. When he alerted the regional office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, regulators let the matter drop after the plant’s owner, Exelon, said it found no evidence of guards asleep on the job.

So Beal videotaped the sleeping guards. The tape, eventually given to WCBS, a CBS television affiliate in New York City, showed the armed workers snoozing against walls, slumped on tabletops or with eyes closed and heads bobbing.

The fallout of the broadcast is still being felt. Last month, Exelon, the country’s largest provider of nuclear power, fired Wackenhut, which had guarded each of its 10 nuclear plants. The NRC is reviewing its own oversight procedures, having failed to heed Beal’s warning. And Wackenhut says that the entire nuclear industry needs to rethink security if it hopes to meet the tougher standards the NRC has tried to impose since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

Emphasis added by me.

The one thing I can count on the majority of my fellow Americans not doing is actual work.

I see it all the time.

I’m stuck waiting on line while cashiers gossip.

I’m stuck waiting for service while those who are supposed to provide service talk to one another.

I see the so-called Security in the Satan Island Ferry Terminal — NYPD and Wackenhut-like third-party placements — stand around and talk.

Talk talk talk.

You disgust me, you talkers. You really do.

What are you being paid for, to enhance your egos by boasting to one another? Or to do a specific job during a specific set of hours that entail carrying out specific functions?

The worst ones — the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel — are the ones who talk to me. They’re like retarded little children desperately looking for someone else’s approval.

Grow up, dammit!

When the Collapse Of All Things occurs — and, man, it is a given — these very same people will look around and wonder what caused it.

Cue the mirror.

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