So You Went And Moved In With A Spy

Who is that person sitting across from you? Do you know them as well as you think? What if the person you are closest to isn’t the person you thought they were?

Living with someone who toils in secrets and anonymity isn’t the easiest. It becomes a juggling act for both people. Whether it’s a roommate, a family member, or a lover, you’re in an awkward position.

The Laundry Room: Eventually, laundry gets intermixed. If you’re a communications technician, you’ll come home with dirt, dust, and some grime on your clothes. It’s normal. Spies come home with a variety of particulates that would be shocking. Explosive residue, gunpowder, and blood, to name a few.

So you’ll have to take extra care not to intermix your items. Make sure to ask your roommate, or cohabitant, to clear out the laundry before you need to wash those embroidered shirts and khaki pants. Or, you’ll have to turn a blind eye to things.

Communications: Do you live in the midwest, Montana, or some backwoods area that isn’t known for anything? Does your partner or roommate take trips to the big city? Why are they there? What do they do?

The simplest story might spin out of control when they start to panic during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It happened on the other side of the planet, and while Washington D.C. was in an uproar, most of America didn’t know where Ukraine was.

If you live with someone afraid they’d have to travel, suddenly there are people on speaker with deep foreign accents, and government vehicles suddenly start making stops in your neighborhood, your best friend or closest confidant might have more secrets than they can tell.

Terminology and Slips of the Tongue: When you’re living with an I.T. tech, a web developer, a security consultant, or a professor, and none have ever been in government service, watch for slips of the tongue or terminology that you haven’t heard.

• Wet Work
• Geo Stability
• Security Clearance
• GS ratings
• Safe House
• Validation Code
• Extraction Code

And there are many others that you should watch for.

How They Look: One thing about government agents, and I'd imagine spies, is that they look stressed or pensive most of the time. After hours of watching their backs, being out in the cold, and not knowing when they'll be safe, a spy's job is a lonely and dangerous profession. Kind of sucks to be them.

The male spy has some interesting things to consider, concerning their looks. Even the famed British secret agent, 007, had to consider things to the most minute detail. For example, what gear did he want to carry?

There is a reason he carried the PPK. It's a small framed semi-automatic that didn't stick out in his jackets. People who weren't aware he was James Bond might not have known he was a licensed killer working for Her Majesty.

In short, if you’re not living with a writer or someone with an active imagination, and they get a little drunk and start talking about things at work that sounds like a James Bond movie, you’re living with someone from the Illuminati, a government agent, an intelligence analyst, or worse.

It’s probably best not to tell them you know and to watch their back until you find a new living situation.

If any of this applies to you, good luck, and remember that chemically getting rid of marks isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. So if you smell something rotten, who in your area is missing?