*To cover any fancy legal footwork against May and Lucy, any resemblance to persons, places, events, are purely coincidental. All stage names and people are fictional. In saying that, May and Lucy’s work performance will probably get them fired anyway.
Now that uni is back in full swing, Critic Te Ārohi feels safe in saying that festival season is officially #over. While we’ve done our fair share of festival attending, we’ve never stopped to think about the poor sods that are stuck festival working other than to drunkenly shout at them to please pour us another vodka Redbull. As such, we enlisted a couple of our writers to work as security guards at one of Aotearoa's most popular festivals.
Through the devoted eyes of May* and Lucy*, we heard the mistakes, the fuckups, the secret locations and the incidents heard on walkie-talkies that go unreported and unseen by the lowly festival goer. We know where all the gaps in the fencing are – so many there aren’t enough guards to cover them all. Whether you were ketted out and dropped a flask in front of May, or collapsed at Lucy’s feet while you were coming up, Critic heard about it – and wrote it down for all of our readers today. Throughout the article, we’ve also compiled a list of #festivalhacks to keep in mind for your next bender. We won’t tell you what festival these two worked at – it’s up to you to decide for yourself.
DAY ONE
1200 HOURS
At this time, the festival attendee is slinging a shot of tequila as they pull on their shortest skirt and oldest Sambas, or best button up shirt and cleanest jorts. Sunglasses are artfully placed on the head, there’s a cheerfully plump bag of gear in pocket, and Birkenstocks polished to a shine.
Around this time, May and Lucy blast into a resident’s only park in a flashy looking suburb, hoping to secure a free space for eleven hours. They’ve been travelling for hours to get here, and are supposed to be clocking in for their shift in 17 minutes.
If you were a concerned middle-aged mum watching from the sidewalk, you’d see a couple of girls in a violent struggle with their security uniform, bare bums in the air as they pull work pants on. Their ugly outfits are complete when an eye-wateringly bright orange jacket is zipped up, and Lucy straps her security license to her arm. Unfortunately, May never got her security licence. In fact, she was hired without a criminal background check, any relevant experience, or even an interview. She is literally just a woman dressed like a traffic cone, but she’d come to find that she wasn’t the only guard who had never worked security before, let alone at a festival.
1227 HOURS
May and Lucy sprint over four roads and two bridges to get to the site base. If that wasn’t enough of a public humiliation ritual, their jackets are emblazoned with ‘SECURITY’ across their backs and arms. Literally nobody likes security, and they’re already receiving dirty looks as a result. Lucy agrees with this sentiment as she doesn’t even really like working as security. After three wrong turns they emerge at the base, panting. A wristband is tightened around their wrists, which gives them access to all areas of the festival. To remove it, they’d have to cut it off.
There’s a good security budget and around four different security companies here, but it’s pretty obvious from the get go that money can’t buy organisational skills. It becomes apparent over the weekend that none of these contracting companies remotely respect each other, as the radio channel is saturated with complaints about the mistakes of other companies. Additionally, the security company May and Lucy are employed by are relatively new on the block, and are keen to make a name for themselves at this festival. As such, Lucy is quietly told that some of their team are being employed as ‘security’, but are in fact told to do something else entirely. In reality, their only role is to greet patrons and make conversations with them to boost the company’s reputation. For these ‘guards’, public safety is a secondary goal to being smiley and shiny. In practical security terms, they are utterly useless.
1237 HOURS
May and Lucy just manage to snag a radio. Their employer is about twenty radios short, which means that a fifth of the team is completely devoid of communication. These people are told to just shout out or run to find their supervisor. Right.
TIP #1: If security pulls you up for being troublesome at a festival, look to their ear to see if they have a radio in to call for help. If they don’t, gun it. May and Lucy couldn’t tell any festival goers apart once they had wandered from about a meter away from them, because all the boys wore button up shirts and low-taper fades and all the girls blended into one mush of dancing barbie festival princesses.
At 1321 hours, the leaders are still scrambling to organise their troops. May and Lucy have been paid for 21 minutes of work without even leaving base. Gates open in just under an hour, and May’s team leader is nowhere to be found. Lucy’s supervisor shows her where she’ll be positioned for the day. May stares after her desperately. No one has bothered to teach May how to use the radio, but they have provided pizza! As Lucy leaves, she hears a last minute hire reciting his tax code and bank account number off by heart to the management team, who scrawls it in the margin of their notepad.
1355 HOURS
You’re either still doing lines in a motel bathroom or waiting for the gates to open in five minutes – which will not happen. Two minutes before ticketing is supposed to open and an hour and a half since all staff have arrived, the Comms team sends out a call to confirm all staff are ready and in position. There’s an immediate flurry of activity over the radio. It sounds like nobody is ready for gates to open, and there are five staff from three different companies wandering around looking for their team leader. An entire barrier lies unconstructed next to the stage. It takes a further five minutes for the management team to figure out that the Magnet Room* and Magnet VIP Bar* are in fact, two different places and both need to be staffed. Eventually, the staff at the entrance open the gates ten minutes late, and patrons begin to rush in.
May has been placed at the edge of Sunset Bar*, which is situated close to the Main Stage*. Her supervisor asks where her security licence is. She says she was hired without one. She will be asked this thirty-seven times in the next two days. Her supervisor shrugs at this before telling May that they’ll have to fake it. Because she is unlicensed, she cannot legally stop anyone or ask them to leave the festival. So while she can check an attendee’s ticket or issue a special lanyard, if someone walks straight past her, the only thing she can do is radio her supervisor and give them a description of the person. She is told to keep her head down as the licensing council is coming around to check accreditation, which she does not have. They are too short staffed to move her to ticketing, one of the few positions which don’t require a license.
May witnesses some crazy shit at her post next to the Sunset Bar. The bar is absolutely packed because of a high up VIM (Very Important Menace) named Gordon* – who fired off message after message inviting people into the bar. May was given special instructions to give anyone with “a text from Gordon” a special lanyard and allow them access to the bar.
TIP #2: The way into VIP bars is through connections. More often than not, the people getting into VIP bars are not the people paying over a grand to get access. Everyone in New Zealand knows everyone, so get thinking a month out of the festival. It’s worth it to hit up that uncle’s mate who works in marketing, or your flatmate's sister who dates one of the artists.
However, halfway through the afternoon Gordon realised he had too many friends. As a result, he instructed May that if any other Gordonators arrived brandishing a text message to her, she was to tell them that “Gordy is unavailable” or that “Gords is not even here”. There were a couple of problems with these instructions, which May soon encountered. Firstly, Gordon obviously liked the idea of being a super nice guy, and loved watching drunk people fizzing to get into an open bar. As such, he kept firing off text invitations mercilessly. Secondly, when May had to tell them one of his autofill excuses, they could actually see Naughty Gordy in the bar behind her. At this point, dejected Gordonators would usually be bold and drunk enough to start an argument with May: an unlicensed and legally powerless guard.
May also noticed that a couple members of the production crew for the Main Stage came back time and time again to flash their wristbands and get free drinks. By the end of the night, she reckons they must have been wasted. While crew members are technically allowed access to all areas, it’s up in the air as to whether this includes getting boozy at Sunset Bar on the job. The security guard working with May (also unlicensed – they bonded over this) did ask the thirsty crew whether they were supposed to drink on the job, and got only laughs in return. With wide grins, eyes the size of the moon and crusty noses, it seems third tier influencers love gear just as much as all of you breathas and sheathas.
Worst of all were the sleazy men. They’d come up to her and make her take their lanyards off of their neck when they were leaving the bar, hands full with drinks. “It feels like winning a medal,” they’d sneer at her drunkenly. The other guard she was working with, also a girl, looked visibly uncomfortable for much of the night. “Do they just love having female security guards or something?”, she murmured, looking down at her docs.. It was a difficult reality – working at security, but not being taken seriously, or having any control over the situation at all.
TIP #3: A security license is mandatory for guards acting as crowd controllers, giving them the power to search bags and people, or the right to remove people from any specific areas. Employers hiring unlicensed security guards can be faced with heavy fines. Guards are legally required to display their security license at all times. Most guards are licensed, trained and competent, but if you have a negative interaction with an employee or believe you are being treated unfairly, check to see if they are actually licensed to give yourself an out.
While May was fending off Gordon & Co, Lucy was working at the entrance to the stage production area under a VIP bar facing the Magnet Stage.* This is interesting for about three minutes. She notices that one guy’s role is just to wander around the field with his Macbook, finding the dead spots in the music and making tiny adjustments. Usually when Lucy works security, she tries to chat with the people working nearby or else she is bored to tears. However, the Production Crew are all terribly busy or a bit up themselves, because even when they sit on the couch rolling cigarettes before each act starts, only one of them bothers to ask her name.
2100 HOURS
Behind Lucy is a secret staircase that leads up to a VIP bar overlooking the stage. Only it’s not so secret, as everyone seems to know that it leads to the bar despite her lying and saying it just leads to more sound production. The only thing that separates her from the writhing mass of people watching the headliner is a tiny gate, watched by another guard. Lucy is subjected to attempted bribing, pleading, threatening and negotiating with anyone who manages to get her attention. Her friends from university beg her to turn a blind eye and let them up the stairs. Any attempt to get Lucy to fold is futile – even if someone did get past her, they’d be stopped by another guard further up asking where their lanyard is, and Lucy would be promptly fired for failing what is essentially her only job.
Some eager beavers do manage to get past the first guard in front of her, and Lucy has to physically block their path up to the stairs and move them back. They press their bodies into the gate, looking at her like lost puppies, asking again and again if they could please come up. It’s tedious. One of the boys is so drunk Lucy can’t even reason with him. Every quarter of an hour or so, a group of people manage to slip past the first entrance and sporadically attempt to barge past her up the stairs. This particularly annoys Lucy, because she’s trying to watch the show instead of focusing her full attention on the job out of spite. She’s only been given one fifteen minute break throughout the ten hour shift.
However, because she’s elevated over the crowd, Lucy gets a great view of the stage. The production crew is controlled and focused, with about five different sound panels and switchboards they dart between. Photographers rush in and out, one of them using the flash on his camera to blind everyone (Lucy included) to get in and out of the crowd. In some ways, the chaos is beautiful, and Lucy appreciates the way the music reverberates in her ribs. There is a single portaloo daintily placed between a maze of scaffolding. The predominantly male, indie-ish looking crew access it by swinging over, around and under the lines of metal, like wee children at a jungle gym. The absurdity of it all effectively erases the performative macho they attempt to ooze.
TIP #4: If you want to get a better position to watch the stage, get hired as a security guard or stop bothering Lucy. A tiny man sat on the recycling bin to watch the show and she couldn’t care less because he wasn’t trying to wheedle her into letting him clamber up the stairs.
About halfway through the headliner, a girl staggers to Lucy’s gate, pleading to be let in. She wants to run down the passageway and vomit. Lucy doesn’t know what to do, but the girl has started gagging with a hand over her mouth. This is all happening worryingly close to Lucy, so she moves the tiny man’s legs from the recycling bin and opens it for the girl to vomit. She spews twice, and begs again to be let out of the crowd. Lucy quickly opens the gate for her to run down. The crowd is incensed, asking why they can’t use the passageway. Lucy can’t reason with them all at once, so she just signals to her earplugs and mouths that she can’t hear.
2330 HOURS
The shift has finally ended, and May and Lucy are dead on their feet. May has gotten one ten and one fifteen minute break in total over the ten hours, and Lucy has gotten one 20 minute break. Apparently this is the norm in security work, even though legally they have an entitlement to a total one hour of breaks for a 6-10 hour shift. They are told that no one else on staff got proper breaks either, so not to complain. Collapsing into bed at 0030 hours after being awake for 21 hours, they set their alarm for 1100 tomorrow.
TIP #5: The best place to hop fences are usually on the opposite side of the main entrances – right into the artist’s backstage area, or the toilet blocks, or surrounded by trees. Unlike the main entrances which are saturated with guards, here is where the fencing runs out, massive trucks shielding the fence from view and where the staff go for dinner breaks and to look at their phones. On breaks, staff aren’t actively looking for fence jumpers, especially if this is their first break in hours.
DAY TWO
1312 HOURS
They’d badly misjudged the traffic and their sense of direction. May’s shift started half an hour before Lucy’s, so she is fifteen minutes early but Lucy is fifteen minutes late. Despite this, they are both deemed late and May has already been redeployed. They have been demoted to spares. They are told to follow a man with two different radios plugged into each ear to be given a new job.
1347 HOURS
After an anxious wait, they are placed in the Inside Stage* at each end of the barrier. May is approached by about ten men who limit their conversation to asking if she has her security licence. None of the other barrier boys were asked, and she was wondering if she was about to get redeployed – but May and Lucy are just the people they were looking for.
It turns out that last night there were over sixty unconscious people, mostly girls, that had to be pulled over the barrier and evacuated to medics. Standard procedure is to have at least one female guard present to manage situations like this, instead of having intoxicated women manhandled by two male security guards. May and Lucy feel important. They’ve been given a proper job, on the barrier! Lucy’s head deflates when a guard comes over to drop a case of water off to split “between the barrier boys.” She supposes she is part of the wallpaper.
1700 HOURS
Halfway through the night, May and Lucy are moved to the emergency exits on the Inside Stage. They are told firmly these are for exit only out of the indoor stage. The purpose of this is to get people out as fast as possible. It is not a free for all, but many people seem to find this a difficult concept to grapple with. Almost immediately after they are positioned, a girl collapses at Lucy’s feet. Her friends flock and cluck about her, and her eyes are as wide as saucers. She’s having a beautiful, nauseating come-up and May has to feed her water out of Lucy’s water bottle sip by sip. As this is happening, a guy behind them pours a whole drink over May’s head while she’s kneeling down so it splatters all over her to puddle at her feet. Lucy is radioing furiously for a response team, but they never come, so they have to drag her into the recovery position outside themselves. While this is happening, people are flowing into the narrow gap of the exit only areas gleefully, an open exit too tempting an offer for a drunken crowd despite the girl in clear need of medical attention at their feet.
TIP #6: Security guards are really there to help. May and Lucy are shrivelling in shame from being recognised from uni or their storied past. But even when they’re being shouted at – because no one really likes security guards when you're having a good time – they will feed you water and help you up and get you to a safe place. It’s best to tell the truth if you’re too fucked to move.
Lucy and May get a hold on the situation and manage to shut the exits again. Sometimes the gates burst open if people make a run for it to get in. They ask nicely, they point to a non-existent friend, they stomp their foot and cajole. Lucy tells them she is being watched by the cameras. This is a lie. She cannot see any cameras in the Inside Stage, which is why there were so many empty flasks on the ground after everyone cleared out. However, she is being watched by her supervisor, who lumbers over to cast a beady eye on May and Lucy every once in a while. Sometimes Lucy gives up if they’ve got a really good excuse, or she can’t be bothered. Yes, get the fuck in, just this once. Sometimes May gets angry, when people are backed up behind trying to get out (she can smell the vomit brewing) and there’s a group of people blocking the exit while they try to elbow their way past her. At 1800 hours, the first unconscious person is reported. This is concerningly early, especially considering the fact that Lucy had overheard two guards gossiping that the day before that some paramedics had walked past the stage where a girl was passed out, “and just strolled on.” Often, there was such a delay in a response team to take people to the medical tent that by the time they came, the person had staggered off into the darkness and deemed no longer an issue or completely unconscious.
TIP #7: When you can’t see any cameras, you might be lucky enough to be in a blind spot. But usually, you are being watched on the ground or higher vantage points. May and Lucy’s radio was constantly going off with guards monitoring potential illegal activities or people having too good of a time.
2045 HOURS
The penultimate act was phenomenal. However, it was disconcerting for Lucy to feel the nebulous throb of drum and bass without alcohol to smooth out the edges. She can see everything in bitterly sharp contrast, each patron’s face sticky with spilled drinks dribbling down their chins. Throughout the set, people would jump over the fence into the indoor stage at the far exit which was unmanned. After radioing through for backup, trying to be heard over the constant calls for response teams and medics, the girls are told “not to worry about it” and essentially turn a blind eye. There are more pressing matters at stake. So, as instructed, May and Lucy turned their backs and watched the whole set for free, and sober, which they think made them appreciate the music so much more.
In the break between the next act, Lucy ran off to use the portaloo, but was cut-off by the act’s guest singer sashaying in front of her to get to the toilet she was beelining to. She was probably in the wrong place. Later, grabbing her bags, she almost slammed face-first into the headlining DJ backstage. Sadly, the security guards were told not to talk with or engage with any of the artists unless they talked to them first. They were not allowed to take any photos or get their autographs either.
2300 HOURS
The Inside Stage’s last act has just ended. May and Lucy have been told to usher people out and clear the space. They try their luck and ask their supervisor if they can go watch the last five minutes of the festival’s headliner, “and usher people out, we promise!”. He must be feeling nice, because he jerks his head. “Go on, you two,” he grunts.
The crowd is massive. The girls are about 200 metres out before they remember they are security guards. Both of them put a hand to their earpiece, assuming a frown of concentration like they’re listening to something important. To be fair, people were shrieking for response teams left and right as pingers collapsed like bowling pins in every corner of the stage. They shoulder their way through the crowd, indicating that they are security and this is a Very Serious Matter. Remarkably quickly, the girls burst out of the mosh somewhere near the front. They’re slowed down briefly when a table-full of people behind them completely flip the thing and land on their backs on the ground, feet dangling in the air. There’s a split second where the girls wonder if they can be bothered to assist before they remember they are literally employed to help them.
TIP #8: Being caught in the mosh is a state of mind. May and Lucy dove through the crowd like Moses parting the seas. They like to think this is because of their inherent confidence and not because people avoided their lurid security uniforms like the plague.
However, the girls get to stand there gawping at the fireworks with everyone else. They’re so sleep deprived they feel like they’re on drugs with the rest of you and swaying slightly from standing up for so long. The cherry on top was when their shift ended, and instead of letting May and Lucy through the back exit to clock out faster, the guard from a rival security company manning a back passageway insisted that the two girls follow the crowd out.
There they were, jammed butt-cheek to butt-cheek within a tidal wave of pingers trying to get out.
Unwittingly in the festival mosh at last.
*Names changed
