But the next morning, I got up, put on my one good shirt, and drove across town to a plant on the other side of Muncie, where I had heard they still wanted a real watchman and not a wall of cameras.
Because I had spent twenty-six years learning that a camera does not smell smoke. It does not hear a machine humming wrong at three in the morning. It records, and a recording is a fine thing after a building has already burned, but it will not walk the floor and lay a hand on a bearing going hot and know, from twenty-six years of nights, that something is about to fail.
A camera does not need a pension, the new security chief had said, coffee in his hand, not even sitting down.
I did not argue with him. I just went and got hired at the plant across town, where an old plant manager who knew my name shook my hand and said he would take a man who could hear a fire coming over a hundred cameras any night of the week.
Nineteen days after I left my old plant, it caught fire in the small hours.
A machine had been running hot for days, the kind of slow wrong hum I would have caught on my first lap. The cameras saw it start. They recorded the whole thing, beautifully, in high definition. But the young kid on shift was asleep in the break room with his phone, and a camera cannot pick up a telephone and call the fire department. By the time the smoke reached a sensor, the back of the floor was gone.
No one was hurt, thank God, because it was the night shift and the floor was nearly empty. But the damage ran into the millions, and when the insurance men and the fire marshal pieced it together, they said the same thing I could have told them for free. A man walking that floor would have caught the hot machine hours before it ever caught fire. A camera only watches things burn.
They called me. Of course they called me. They asked me to come back, offered me more than they had ever paid me, begged me nearly.
I told them no, kind as I could. I had a floor to walk now, at the plant across town, where they never once thought a machine could replace a man who cared whether the place was still standing in the morning.
A camera does not need a pension, he said, like it was the smartest thing anyone ever figured out. But a camera also does not love the place. It does not lie awake feeling responsible for every soul who will walk in at seven. I did that for twenty-six years, alone, at three in the morning, so nobody else had to. That is not a cost you cut. It is the whole reason the building is still there in the morning, and they learned it the hard way, nineteen days after they let me go.