The reason I’m back in London is because my elderly mother recently developed cancer. I have to collect her prescriptions from the Boots in the Fulham Broadway Shopping Center. I get the usual gaslighting and intimidation from the center security guards, which I will post about later, and as any reader might expect, the Total Security Services (TSS) security guard in the Boots store is particularly thuggish.
Each time I go in to collect a prescription for my mother, he moves around the store so that he is watching me, clearly agitated, usually with his arms folded, doing the ‘I’m not looking at you’ routine, and then moving away from his position as soon I as walk out the store.
Last week I complained (via e-mail) to the center management (Giulia Puricelli) about both the TSS security guard as well as their center guards. Typically, they have not replied, but at least with the center guards, it’s obvious my complaint was passed on. I made clear that I had to go in to Boots to collect my prescription for my elderly mother (I have to collect the prescriptions at that Boots store) and was being intimidated by their security guard. Despite this, yesterday again it happened. When I walked to the prescription counter, he suddenly appeared and stood in a position to watch me. When I then went to the checkout till to buy some other medical products, he immediately moved to a position by the entrance directly facing me, arms folded, while repeatedly and theatrically looking out in to the center, then turning back to look at me and becoming aggressive if I made any eye contact with him. See the photograph below.
TSS Security Guard Boots Fulham Broadway Shopping Center
The legal justification appears to be that I get agitated at the fact that I (somebody in the past who suffered from the devastating mental illness paranoid schizophrenia), is and has been pointed to security guards in over a dozen different countries for well over a decade, including at dozens of Boots stores, and it never being admitted to me that this is the case, and in fact explicitly denied (as a ‘delusion’ on my part) many times (including by Boots Customer services). This guard in the photo is presumably thinking (based on whatever info he has been given about me) that I’m just a ‘nutter’ who doesn’t like being looked at by security guards, and that he has to ‘stand up to me’. Yes, all these thousands of tough security guards, including hundreds in Eastern Europe, no doubt many with links to mafia etc, are the victims, not the mentally ill member of the public being sadistically gaslighted by them, their security firms, and the various police forces pointing me out to them. Note I have never once been aggressive with a security guard anywhere. I just look suspiciously at them or sometimes agitatedly when it all gets too much, as it would for any normal person, let alone a person with my history after over a decade of it across an entire continent.
The Ricky Gardezi TSS Security Guard at Boots Fulham Broadway observing me paying at a self-service till while not observing the law on Covid face coverings.
I am absolutely proud of the way I have handled this over the last 13 years.
This brute actually looks like he might use violence. I feel I should go in to the store and ask to speak to the manager (apparently one Rabia Bennet), but I do fear this thug might attack me. In any case, the manager will no doubt ‘reassure me’, and humiliate me in front of members of the public, by slowly telling me that it’s all a co-incidence, and that the security guard is not looking or me, or is ‘looking at everybody’.
I walked out of the store, walked half-way towards the entrance/exit to the Broadway, and then walked back to see if the guard was still in the same position 20 seconds later. No, he had gone (and I took another photograph to prove it).