Many, many years ago (in the early 1980s), my job required me to visit a steelworks. All people, including employees, leaving the site were required to allow their car boots (US = trunks) to be searched, to prevent people stealing scrap. I would have thought that this would be a cursory "Open up mate ... fine, off you go", but it was carried out by security guards who were reckoned to be rejected by the Prison Service as unsuitable sociopaths. They would occasionally and without obvious cause, insist on drivers removing every item from the boot, including spare wheels and toolkits. Of course, this could hold up a whole shift trying to leave the site at clocking-off time, for several minutes at a time.

To say the least, industrial relations at this works belonged in the days when they were building the pyramids, and sometimes, when industrial action took place or was threatened, the security guards had to be careful about walking alone down dark alleys at night.

Urban legend (possibly inspired by Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time") at the site had it that workers once put together a complete car from the bits and pieces in the scrap bins and drove it past the Neanderthals on the gate without raising suspicion.