Surveillance

Recently, we began a project that has both built in time constraints and is very surveillance heavy. So I have spent the last four days sitting in a car making sure my head is not above the window line for thirteen hours at a time.

A long time ago, the bad guys started watching for cars sitting around where they were "working" that would routinely come and go (Det. eating, going the bathroom etc). If the drug dealers saw this pattern, they would quickly shut down and disappear. In order to counter, their counter surveillance, we arrive in the early morning and stay, in basically one place, until night fall.

This week was the first week I have had of multiple stints of this type of surveillance. I can not remember when I have been this sore. Everything hurts and not like the R.E.M. song. I am still trying to figure out why after doing nothing for thirteen hours, it feels like I have been digging a ditch for those same thirteen hours. Plus, you have not lived till you have to create a bathroom schedule and pack three lunches keeping in mind that your food will be staying with you the whole time (I will not make a salami sandwich again...at the end my car smelled like a dumpster in the back of an Italian deli).

I did not think it was possible but I ran out of food, reading materials, people to talk to on the phone and people to send text messages. I have realized that I could never be a monk, I simply do not want to sent that much time with myself.

Anyway when you see surveillance on television or in movies, they have space, the bad guys show up quickly with their intentions clear and the protagonists do not smell of rotting sandwiches. I wanted to provide a slice of reality and I hope that my next assignment does not find me sitting in a cardboard box next to a warehouse (its been done).

Joel 2:20
"I will drive the northern army far from you, pushing it into a parched and barren land, with its front columns going into the eastern sea and those in the rear into the western sea. And its stench will go up; its smell will rise." Surely he has done great things.