Large Fierce Mammal

The Maytag Repair Man, with whose professional travails I share absolutely nothing.

On the day I graduated from high school in 1975, my plans for postsecondary education were directed toward a career in Aerospace Engineering. It would be four years before I came to realize how the end of hostilities in a conflict half a world away had changed all that before it even left the starting gate.

While the world of airplanes and rockets, high performance jet engines, precision guidance systems, and remote sensing isn’t all about finding and killing an enemy, that dark side keeps the lights on in a lot of factories. The sudden absence of an active, high intensity conflict — specifically, the Vietnam War — gutted the aerospace industry worldwide to the degree where contracts serving airlines and general civil aviation needs were barely enough to provide big names — meaning big employers — with anything better than a controlled descent as they circling the drain.

And so it came to pass that I one day found myself looking backward at four years of student debt, ahead at another two yet to go, and the grim prospect of being ejected at the end of it all, fresh and new in a job market awash with unemployed but vastly more experienced and better qualified people.

Notwithstanding my distaste for the trite expression about what one must do when life bestows lemons, what came out of the situation was undeniably a case of making something palatable from the available fruit.

It is well known that the horrors of war are a crucible of innovation spawning technologies and techniques intended to grant the forces of their developers lethal superiority over the enemy, and cancel out that other’s  countervailing efforts. When a major conflict dies down, those heretofore secret methodologies have no choice but to come out into the light and go looking for honest work. So it was for things that used to be dropped into the night from blacked out airplanes, or hand planted by reconnaissance patrols along jungle roads and trails where the vibration of too many footfalls or a convoy of trucks, served as the catalyst for an air strike. For electronic eyes that could detect a living presence — even a vehicle that hadn’t been running for hours by its thermal emissions against the background — so Spooky would know exactly which rock to shoot under. While their specifics may have been classified, their existence wasn’t even a badly kept secret, so if you knew where to look (as I did), much could be learned, and even built, with knowledge and a trip to your local Radio Shack.

It stood me in good stead that I had grown up the son of a highly skilled electronics technician from whom I had acquired the knowledge and skills required to earn me full access to his workshop. Likewise that, as you will have guessed by now, I had no small amount of interest and knowledge, both self-acquired and paid for, in the subjects of electronic systems designed to capture and display imagery, detect threats of every stripe my suite of available technologies could manage, and communicate an actionable state of affairs to those with an interest in the matter.

The die was cast! The electronic security industry was on the cusp of a revolution as manufacturers of military surveillance, target detection, and secure communications technologies obtained the necessary clearances to demilitarize their products and slick them up for the civilian commercial market; all at the time I was finding myself in need of a job. Living in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the time, I cozied up with the Yellow Pages, made to a list of security companies already established in other areas like guard services, private investigations, and guard dogs, and started calling around looking for any with an interest in expanding into electronic security.

By the time the name of Whynacht Security ever came to be engraved on a shingle and hung out to flap in the wind in 1983, I had already been doing business as a security consultant for two years, one year each for two Dartmouth based security companies, evaluating equipment for standardization, writing job specifications, and training technicians in the arcane arts of installation and troubleshooting. Compared with the tools we have at our disposal now, everything we were using back then was first generation, and it fell to system designers and installers to understand the strengths and limitations of ultrasonic, passive infrared, and microwave motion detectors; glass breakage detectors tuned to the specific fracture frequency of glass, seismic and vibration sensing systems to detect people passing over paved and unpaved surfaces, or attempting to mount a chain link fence.

Coming forward to a century most of us Cold War kids didn’t believe we’d ever live to see, this industry now parallels defense specific applications and no longer feeds on the castoffs of war. Professionals in the field are called upon to address fast growing threats that can metamorphose in scope and damage potential almost daily, developing and applying tools and methods that are becoming progressively more specialized.

Meanwhile, the light commercial and residential security and surveillance systems market is awash with do-it-yourself or barely “professional” mass market security products built on proprietary subscription services that leave sensitive and highly personal information and imagery in the hands of third or fourth parties that most likely will not be located in Canada, and therefore are not subject to the privacy and consumer protection laws you might think apply to the relationship. And because so many crave the illusion of security over the reality, ’twill ever be thus.

This being the case, you would think a dinosaur like me would be, by now, the security version of the allegorical Maytag Repair Man. My phone logs and the odometers of my vehicles will put the lie to that.

As it turns out, not everyone wants the illusion.