Tanaka was the kind of security guard who took the job dead seriously. For three years running, he had kept his incident count at zero.
He stationed himself at the building entrance and spoke up whenever a visitor looked off. He walked over to check unattended cardboard boxes. He shone his flashlight at suspicious shapes in the bike lot. Somehow, whenever something awkward was about to happen, Tanaka was already there. And every time, it ended without incident.
“Nothing today either,” he’d say at every shift handoff. His younger colleagues laughed and told him he was lucky. Tanaka figured they were probably right.
Then in April, a letter arrived from the building management company. Following a review of security operations, they would not be renewing his contract. Under the reason field: insufficient performance record.
That is to say: Incidents: 0.
Tanaka stared at the paper for a while. Zero was apparently the problem. The fact that nothing had happened had been processed as evidence that he had done nothing. He almost nodded along — huh, I suppose that’s how it looks — but then quietly shook his head.
On his last day in May, he returned the booth key and ran the new guy through the handoff. The replacement was in his thirties, energetic to the point of being exhausting, and said “I’ll give it my all” about three times. Tanaka told him, “Hope nothing comes up,” and headed home.
The next morning, the new guard spotted a suspicious individual, approached him, asked a few questions, and — finding him to be an unrelated passerby — sent him on his way with an apology. The new guard wrote it up in his report.
At the end of the month, the section manager at the management company opened the report. It was the new guard’s first-day write-up. Incidents: 1. The manager signed off with a broad, satisfied stroke of his pen.