The Caller Who Knew What I Was Wearing

I did overnight tech support for a home security company, which, in hindsight, is a deeply ironic place to have had the most frightening shift of my life.

Nights were quiet. You got the occasional false alarm, someone whose cat set off a motion sensor, the odd person locked out by their own app. Mostly you sat in a big beige room under those lights that hum, four of us spread across forty empty desks, and you watched the clock refuse to move.

The call came in around three in the morning. No caller ID, which happens, but the line was strange -- too clear, no background, like the person was calling from inside a sealed box.

"Support, this is Danny," I said.

"Danny." The voice was flat. Male, maybe. "You should fix the light above you. The one that flickers. It's been flickering all night."

I looked up. The light above my desk was, in fact, flickering. Had been for an hour. I had complained about it.

"I'm sorry," I said, doing the script, "are you experiencing an issue with your system tonight?"

"You're wearing the gray hoodie," the voice said. "The one with the hole in the left sleeve. You keep putting your thumb through it."

I was. I was doing it right then. My thumb was through the hole in the sleeve.

I want to tell you I stayed calm. I did not. I stood up so fast my chair rolled back and hit the desk behind me, and I looked around that big beige room at the windows, which at three in the morning are just black mirrors, and I could not see anything past my own reflection. My coworker Alina looked over at me, mouthed "you okay," and I could not answer.

"Who is this," I said.

"Check the camera," the voice said. "The lobby camera. Feed four."

We had a security feed for our own building -- of course we did, we were a security company. I pulled up feed four with shaking hands. The lobby. Empty. The glass doors. Empty. The parking lot beyond, lit orange, one car. My car.

"I don't see anything," I said.

"Look again," the voice said. "Feed four."

I looked. And there, in the corner of the lobby feed, just at the edge, was the back of a head. Someone sitting in one of the lobby chairs, facing away, phone to their ear. Inside our locked building. At three in the morning.

I dropped the headset. I got Alina, and the two guys on the floor, and we called our actual overnight guard, Big Mike, who we had all frankly forgotten existed. Mike went down to the lobby with his flashlight and his enormous ring of keys, and the four of us watched feed four like it was the season finale of our lives.

Mike walked into frame. He tapped the person on the shoulder.

And the person turned around, and it was -- and I have to be honest with you, this is the part that still gets me -- it was a former employee. A guy named Wesley who had been let go three months earlier. He still had his badge. It still worked, because IT never deactivated it, and he had been coming into the building at night, sitting in the lobby, calling the support line, and describing us. For weeks, apparently. To other people on other shifts. We were just the first ones to catch him.

Wesley did not resist. He just stood up, handed Mike the badge, and said, "The light really does need fixing," and walked out into the orange parking lot.

They fixed the light. I quit the hoodie. I did not last long on nights after that.