“You can take the horse to the water but you can’t make it drink”. How very true! Since I am no “equidae” expert I can’t give any first hand information on that, but I am clearer about its applicability on human beings.
Listen to this story that my father used to say quite often. A plantation overseer tired of the hot sun wanted to break for his siesta. He was sure however that the moment he turned his eye away his slaves would also fall prey to the designs of Morpheus. So he took a big baseball, drew huge eyes on it with some charcoal, hoisted the ball on a stick in the middle of the field and warned “These are my eyes, I might not be physically here but my eyes are watching you and any person not working will be flogged”. So saying he left peacefully to his cabin. The field hand dutifully worked for some time then one of the smart guy noticed that the eyes on the base ball were fixed in one direction and not rolling. So he secretly crept up from behind and threw his hat on the ball covering the eyes completely. He cried “the master’s eyes are closed. Come now let take turns to nap”.
My own experience is a story of sorts. I was then in-charge of a huge store yard which was in a particularly nefarious location. The yard which was of several acres was stocked with rows and rows of valuable copper cable drums. High walls with barbed wire fencing formed the first level of security. Hotlines to fire department and the nearest police station were the second level, and round the clock patrols with security guards were the third level. It was all very nice to mark three guards for duty during the night with instructions to safe guard the items and an entirely different story in making them effective at it. On an average the night shifts were a comparatively easy one’s, for one could sleep after completing certain log enters and some such mandatory things, without the watchful eyes of a supervisor. It is only when the robbers decide to break in that all hell breaks loose.
The schedule is like this, one guard is to man the front gate, one is posted on top of the watch tower provided at the extreme end of the premises and the third to beat the patrol rounds in the complex. They were provided with lathi, a powerful torch light, each a pair gumboots and a whistle. Powerful sodium vapor lamps installed at strategic locations, provided enough illumination. As the yard was once a marsh there was no dearth of dangerous snakes and other creepers, add to this the dangerous burglars armed with axes, crow bars and equally menacing weapons. The guards, naturally, were more prone to skip the beats and save themselves from all the impending dangers. It is here that the tell tale clocks come in.
These clocks were the manual winding clocks types with pendulum. Near the pendulum was a drum which spins in unison with the clock hands. On this drum one could load a paper disc. A long pointed needle protrudes out of the clock face. The person on patrol will have to press this lever and this will punch a hole in the paper disc. This way one could monitor the beat cycles of the patrolling guards.
Three of these clocks I had put up at extremely difficult nooks of the building and I made sure that the clocks were wound daily and the paper disc changed without fail. The instructions to the guard were they should punch these discs on the hour every hour. If the boys missed punching they knew for sure I would almost punch them with my caustic words. Now they were in a dilemma, they either braved the elements and completed the rounds or face my wrath. The former seemed better so for some months I found that they carried out the routine patrols and by blowing the whistle they were putting off the burglars to some extent.
The human spirit is an indomitable one, so someone found out that if the clock was meddled it would stop ticking and so would the disc too. The tell tale clock was so quelled for sometime. Then I constructed a firm box like structure all around the clock with only the lever for punching visible. Now that was check mate. So the ticking of the tell tale clock continued much to the boys chagrin and to my smug pleasure.
TELL TALE CLOCK
The picture I have given below is almost similar to the one’s I used to handle.
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