‘The lack of humanity eats away at you’: Frontline workers spill out bad encounters on the job

‘WHY THE HELL DO I HAVE TO LISTEN TO YOU?’

Security officers are often in a no-win situation, Loo lamented.

“Security officers are damned if you’re there and damned if you aren’t. If you aren’t, I’m sure parents will go, ‘What? There’s not even a jaga (guard) to make sure my kids don’t wander (off) or unsavoury people don’t wander in?’” he said.

“But when you’re there and you try to enforce the rules, you get eye-rolling, you get people going, ‘Why the hell do I have to listen to you? Who are you exactly?’”

He got his security licence in 2019 after a friend had obtained one and said it was relatively easy to get. Loo was not getting many jobs as a freelance copywriter at the time and was looking for an income supplement.

He had only N levels before working as a chef, photographer and copywriter.

He had skipped school “a lot” in Secondary Four and did not turn up for one component of his English language paper. He was marked absent for the entire paper, which “effectively trashed (his) N level certificate”.

According to Loo, the school was not keen to let him continue in Secondary Five, so he opted for the hospitality school, Shatec.

But at the age of 17, he was “too ill-disciplined” to travel from Hougang to Bukit Batok early in the morning for classes and dropped out after nearly a year. He took his O and A levels as a private candidate only years later.

The insults he hates most are people asking if he is stupid. “I have my own pride, and often I think, ‘Man, if I’d gone to university, I’d be your superior,’” he said.

But unkind comments and inadvertent insults were what he heard regularly as a security officer, even from well-meaning people. For instance, some bosses told him, “You should think about your future because you don’t want to end up like your colleagues.”

“This lack of humanity … does eat away at you,” said Loo, who felt that the most disheartening part about the job was being treated as if he was invisible.