Chapter 5: Jobs and Dinners

Thursday morning I had a whole bunch of emails and text messages about last night. The only one that mattered was from Jim. It said “I’ve put you in for 4 hours plus mileage. Oh, and a lifesaving merit badge.:)”

I got SO MUCH SHIT on the bus, for last night. It seemed that the video Rick had been posting had been on the public side of the Discord channel, and everyone on the bus had seen it. I let slip that Dad had accused me of being a Texas Ranger, and they were all calling me “Walker” by the time we got to school.

Homeroom was fine, but I got called out of class first period to go to the office. I wasn’t in trouble from the school. The Principal and some others including two of the county’s school board members wanted to know what happened, so they could get ahead of the story. The key from their point of view was it didn’t happen on school grounds or during school hours and it did happen while I was ‘on the job’ for the state, so there was no blame headed their way. They could, however, take at least partial credit for my maturity and sense of responsibility if they wanted. Sure, man. Whatever.

Jim’s prediction was almost perfect. By lunchtime both the Governor’s office and the ALPRA PR office had released statements about last night’s incident. The Governor’s said that I was a menace and I should be locked up for everyone’s safety.

Dad said later that the Governor’s statement had no actual content, it was merely a politician jumping on a current event to get attention. Sorta like what the druggie did last night, ya know? He also told me that I shouldn’t pull my mace out and threaten to make the Governor shut up, because he had bodyguards.

The ALPRA statement pointed out that the man I’d ejected had been high on drugs, and had attempted to rejoin the meeting with a gun holding seven shots, so my actions had saved up to seven lives aside from allowing the meeting to continue without disruption. I may have violated several state regulations concerning security personnel behavior, but I was neither hired for nor trained as a crowd-control security guard and I was only acting as such because such became needed and none were available.

As the story unfolded, it turned out that this was merely another incident in an ongoing pissing-contest between ALPRA and the Governor’s office about security at ALPRA events. ALPRA was less than a year old. It wanted their events covered for free like all OTHER state government events. The Governor’s office, trying to avoid another budget drain, had refused saying that we had our Weapons and we could provide our own security. ALPRA had been doing so ever since it was formed, with varying levels of success.

Our meeting last night with 25 or so teenagers that ALPRA was responsible for keeping safe had been going out on the internet live, and the incident had blown the controversy sky-high. Yes, I had completely overreached my nonexistent authority, but I had been forced to take action to protect all those helpless children from a deranged killer because the Governor had singled ALPRA out as the only state government agency not allowed to use state troopers for security and crowd control.

Bluntly, the Governor had a choice. He could reverse his earlier stand and allow ALPRA to use the state patrol for security like EVERY OTHER STATE AGENCY, or he could increase ALPRA’s budget to allow us to hire our own security people. You know, properly trained and certified men and women who could keep our children safe in these trying times without bothering those overworked men and women in the state police.

Of course everyone had to point out that the state patrol had ended up getting involved ANYWAY. If Miss Bellini hadn’t called them when I threw the man out, they would have been called five minutes later when he shot the place up. How much money had the Governor’s policy saved, here?

The court of public opinion solidified pretty quickly. The Governor was an idiot. He was throwing a tantrum because his penny-pinching had endangered the state’s children and he’d gotten caught trying to blame someone else for following his own declared and written instructions. Which, by the way, violated the state police’s charter. Protecting the state government’s personnel, offices, and events was, after all, part of their basic job.

I ended up asking Jim what was really going on. He said that the Governor was, in fact, an idiot, but he also did have a point. Josh Smith, ALPRA-1, wore two hats. Yes, he was the Director of the Alabama Portal Regulatory Agency. However, he was actually a Fed, an employee of the USPRA with the title “Deputy Director for Alabama”.

That was probably a large part of the Governor’s heartburn in the first place. ALPRA -and all the other state agencies- had grown out of the original USPRA’s expansion to have an office in each state, and it was the only state agency where the guy in charge was actually a Fed. The Governor could sack all the other department heads, if he had a good enough reason. Not so, with ALPRA.

Jim told me that the official -and real- reason was that the Portals were a national security problem, not a local one, and Washington wanted all of the state agencies to work together when needed. The first eruption, when every un-entered Portal had released several of their Bosses, and then the second one when every Portal -whether entered or not- had released even more, had shown this to actually be a world-wide problem, not just a national one, but international cooperation wasn’t as easy to get.

So, the USPRA, with the rest of the federal government backing it, was determined that all the state PRAs would be directed by one federal Director and administered by 51 federal executives. On the other hand, the PRA was positive that the farther down the bureaucracy they could shove the decision-making and the actual work, the better things would work and the happier everyone would be.