I hate the sound of the clock ticking, but at a dollar above minimum wage and steady hours, I've learned to let it fall into the background noise. The job itself is pretty chill. Most of the night, I sit at a desk and munch on snacks and read. It's quiet, and if I were like my coworkers, the silence would probably drive me mad. Then again, I always have the clock.

Tick Tock...

When I took the job, I was rather nervous. When you hear the word "night guard" you think of scary walks around dark buildings and the chance of danger at any time. I'm just a geek who likes to stay home on the internet and read manga, and I couldn't scare anyone even if I wanted too. My vivid imagination often leaves me the frightened one, in fact.

Tick Tock...

The first few nights I let it get to me. The building is old, and it's been many different things in the past. They say at one point it was a roller skating rink, but now we just call it, "The Old Armory." It doesn't store anything spectacular from what I've seen. Just props for the local university, and other odds and ends from it. The university is just up the street, actually, and it's how I came to get the job. The old night guard was graduating, and I stopped by the campus office one day to see about a part time job just as they were saying good bye.

Tick Tock...

She looked tired I remember, dark circles under her eyes and that drained look all the seniors get around finals time. I only got one night of training from her, and she didn't say much. She spent most of the shift studying with headphones on, and otherwise, only took them off long enough to teach me what to do at certain times. I was supposed to walk the building every hour, making sure no one was climbing in through the windows here or there. She said they didn't lock well and occasionally, kids from the university thought checking out the spooky building down the road was a fun idea. Then I was supposed to walk the outside of the building. We had cameras, she explained, but she wasn't even sure they all worked. We could see the feed from the office, but there were more cameras than showed up on the screen, so we all assumed some stopped working and they never got fixed. The thing is though, no matter where I went on my patrols, I could hear that clock.

Tick Tock...

I didn't notice at first, I was busy being paranoid of some college kid jumping out from behind a dusty desk or catching someone trying to get into the building from outside. I always tried to listen well, for any scuffling or anything that might keep me on my toes and prepared. That's when I noticed I could hear it everywhere.

Tick Tock...

Sometimes I'd sing to myself to try and drown it out, but somehow it always felt louder than I could cover. It wasn't a small clock by any means either and it wasn't directly in the office. It was in the main room of the armory, ornate and antique looking, but worn out too. The second hand wasn't even there, but as dark as it was in the armory I could never tell  if it had once been there or not. Overall, I guess you could say that some nights, the ticking was comforting, like if I'd watched some horror film before work, or on the cold nights when the fog rolled in thick and made my walks around the outside of the building a little extra creepy. Other nights though, it would annoy me. If anything, it always helped me count the hours, watching the hour hand move through the night.

Tick Tock...

Finals just came around again, and I realize I've been working here for a while now. I normally cut myself off from social media and games when finals roll in, and normally this job is great for getting my work done. But ever since I've started to hunker down and study hard, it feels like the clock has gotten louder. I try to focus on my reading, to take notes thoroughly, but that damn clock's ticking feels so loud in the silence of everything that I get annoyed often and end up frustrated and get nowhere.

Today, I am especially fed up, so when I clocked on to change shifts with the day guard, I asked, "Is there any way to turn the stupid clock off?"

"What do you mean? That thing? It doesn't even work." he says, pointing to it.

At first I felt embarrassed, as if I wasn't dorky enough, now he thinks the night nerd is asking strange questions. Then I remembered the ticking, and my head shot up from looking down at my feet nervously, "But.."

But he was already walking out, waving a hand over his shoulder with a, "See ya tomorrow!" I sighed and settled in at the desk, pulling out my books, and up until sunset, the clock didn't tick. I know, because I kept looking up at it to see if it moved but it didn't and I began to consider if I hadn't imagined it was always moving along through the night. I wasn't exactly the best at reading traditional clocks either, especially in the age of digital clocks.

I was working my way through a fairly difficult calulus problem when I heard it.

Tick Tock...

I hesitated to lift my head, but when I finally did I saw the clock rested on 8:30p.m. or something close to that. It had definitely been stuck on 6 o'clock when I clocked on though.