These fictional reminiscences of a museum guard from the years 1987 to 1992 bring to life a hilarious young Jimmy Hendrix wannabe. After eight years of drifting he presents himself at the entry exam for the profession of “contact agent”, succeeds without having been able to answer the questions, and finds himself offered the job. It turns out contact agent is a euphemism for museum security guard, the principle contact with the public. Draped in his dour new uniform, he’s deployed on his first watch, covering zone 76 bis-- sculptures. His colleagues like him come from all parts, all a little downtrodden, and find themselves museum guards for the income and security. The art, to them, as well as the tourists that they guard it from, are alternatively soporific or annoying variables. Meanwhile boredom becomes fertile ground for corruption as drug dealing and prostitution flourishes amongst the guards. The dark underground passages, vaults and utility rooms of the museum become the meeting-places of these drug and sex addicts.

When their dealer is caught, arrested, and put into prison, the fun is over. They can’t use a strike to get what they want this time, so they barricade themselves in the museum and take hostage a couple hundred tourists. The hold up ends in tear gas and in some reduction of sentence for their dealer-friend. Following the incident, many of them leave, but our hero stays on, rather fancied by the museum’s young female director. A few years of his diary show that he stays in the profession he swore he would leave, and that eventually he and his ambitions become more attuned to the life of a museum guard. As he signs off, he gives a big yawn, and wonders why we are more susceptible to the tempatation to sleep through life than to stay awake.

This is part situation comedy and part little philosophical novel set against the backdropof great works of art, and peppered with personal encounters with those silent bystanders in museums who often solicit as much curiosity as the works of art themselves. If you ever wondered what was going through their minds, this is it.