The world of super spies is a sexy one. It’s filled with tuxedos, mixed drinks, sexy babes, high speed chases, super slick technology and trained killers like the world has never seen. It’s a hyper-realistic world where a one man, unstoppable murder machine—lacking superpowers, mind you—can bring down terrorist regimes and despotic villains all while never losing their martini buzz. But that world is the glossy veneer of the hard, and often complicated, reality behind the world’s greatest super agents. James Bond, Ethan Hunt, Jason Bourne, The Kingsman; they’re all products of of a highly regimented, labor intensive, bureaucratic nightmare that no one ever really thinks about. It’s super cool to be a super spy, but the back end—the meat and potatoes—is a pain in the ass. Here’s 5 things you probably never thought about the world of being a super-sexy super spy.

It Takes More Than A Montage To Be A Badass

One of the first things you’ll notice about your "average" super spy is that they are adept in any situation. They are able to improvise with the best, kill with the deadliest and fuck with the sexiest. There’s not a scenario they encounter that they can fight, fuck or drink their way out of. But that kind of shit doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years of drills, training and field exercises to even begin to be prepared to enter the field with any sort of qualifications. Take for example the initial training for an Army Ranger.

Infantry basic training and A.I.T. takes 14 weeks. After that, if an infantry is eligible they can apply and be selected for Ranger School. Ranger School is 61 of the worst days of your life stacked one on top of the other. After that, you’re qualified to be a ranger. Yes, you are qualified to work in the field as a special forces operator but you’re still a baby-faced green horn with no real world experience, no actual field operating abilities and you’re basically an untested rookie that no one would give command of a tube of playdough, let alone allow you to operate independently.

But that’s what a Super Spy does: operates independently of all outside guidance and influence and conducts operations with expertise and immunity. They are capable of executing, with extreme prejudice, on a moment’s notice. That kind of expertise takes YEARS to curate. Field work, seasoned over years of proven operational execution without flaw, to create an operative capable of working at the level of a James Bond type. That doesn’t even begin to touch trade craft, weapons, tech, hand to hand combat, international relations. That five minute training montage can go fuck itself.

Gadgets Ain't Easy or Cheap

What would a super spy be without their gadgets and gizmos? I have worked in the technology and software industry most of my life, and one thing it's taught me is that technological wonders don’t just show up out of nowhere and work like a bucket of bad ass. It takes years of research, development, QA testing, beta programs and even after all of that preliminary work my stupid iPhone still crashes out of the blue for no good reason in the middle of a YouTube video. Now imagine what it takes to insert a video screen, with memory enough to hold a video and retinal scan recognition, into a disposable kodak camera. 

$767 million for this one time use device. You're welcome tax payers.

Every step of the development process for even one of The Kingsman’s fancy doodads requires man power, equipment, money and time. You don’t sketch out a bullet proof, multifunction, murder umbrella on a cocktail napkin on Friday and then hand it off to a field operative on a Monday. You iterate the idea over the course of a long period of time, employing some of the smartest people you can find in order to cram 17 weapons worth of death into a gentlemen’s accessory. One idea, one weapon, millions—if not billions—of dollars in research and development. Creating a fleet of umbrella super weapons, or missile rigged jet cars would take the budget of a large country, years and years of effort and work and then, if you’re lucky, you’d have one item that only the best and brightest would be allowed to use. And only if they’re lucky.

Secret Bunkers Don’t Stock Themselves

A super spy has, at their disposal, a veritable endless supply of safe houses all over the world that are stocked with weapons, technology, forged documents and maybe a portable 3D printer to make a mask of another human being’s face. These things don’t supply themselves. Amazon doesn’t have two-hour delivery in the heart of Bucharest, for a submachine gun, 300 rounds of ammunition, a Swedish passport and high grade laptop that can connect to the encrypted Langley network. All of these safe houses and hidden bunkers have to be maintained by someone. Someone has to make sure that all of that runs like clockwork.

Some poor bastard had to program, test and install this shit

Somewhere, there is a maintenance supervisor whose only job is to make sure that each item of hidden tech is stored correctly; know when is the next maintenance update; what were the last reports on that equipment? Is it getting beyond its replacement date? The random eye scanner on an agency boxcar—did Langley update the encryption software on the authentication framework? Did this remote piece of equipment get that update so it still works as expected? I worked for the Air Force and the amazing amount paperwork that we had to compile just for regular tests of laptops and desktops that were utilized in our facility was HORRENDOUS, and I didn’t have to travel halfway around the world, on a forged passport, to enter a secret password, on a random payphone, under a bridge, in a Krakow ghetto, so that I could access a secret terminal and run a functional test of its systems.

It’s Not Easy To Pretend To Be So Many People

If you’ve ever worked for a large, unwieldy corporation, you know that sometimes the minutiae of day to day to life can be an absolute pain in the ass. They misspell your last name on your email address and it takes three months of internal IT tickets and haranguing to get it right. How much of a pain in the ass is it to make sure that your HR system is up to date with your current address, flex spending account allocations, and current managerial hierarchy? 

Now imagine having to do that for not only the agents that work for your organization, but also for the numerous number of aliases that they have to utilize at any given time—let alone the passports, bank accounts, cover stories and shell corporations that help them to establish who they are. There’s a database somewhere, manned by a small army of very detail oriented nerds, whose only job is to make sure that the tangled web of false fronts and bullshit that allows super spies to operate in the open is maintained. Those poor number-crunching bastards have one bad day and the whole intelligence apparatus falls to shit.

Secret Wars Are a Special Kind of Messy

The reality of war is that it is a special kind of mess that requires thousands of supporting agencies in order to make it go off without a hitch. Like a garden party hosted by Donald Trump and Doctor Octopus, war is a special kind of catastrophe that we, as a species, have agreed to partake in as long as there are rules that we can all obey. These kinds of things happen in the view of the public knowing that there are going to be bad things that happen on both sides and that we, as a nation and a species, will try (like super hard) not too make them be too bad. We fail at it, but we swear that we try.

This is the worst kind of tech support job

Secret wars, on the other hand, are an entirely different beast. If you're a special operative who has just laid waste to an entire clandestine facility by blowing up a special fusion weapon or just bullet-balleting your way through ream after ream of bad guys, somebody has to come and hide the facts of your badassdom. You can't slink from country to country on fake passports with billion-dollar super weapons, turning bad guys to jelly without consequence. Whatever agency you are working for will need to make sure you don't get caught and can continue your rampage of terrorizing justice. In all honesty, there is probably a small army of H.P.E.L (high performing entry level) secret agents whose only job it is is to follow our Bond types around and make sure that the Geneva convention never sees the entrails of their messy affairs. They hope, one day, to not be responsible for making sure that the world never learns about the awful things that our super spies do in order to make the world a safer place. But until then, they have to make sure that not only is James Bond's martini glass full of booze; his laser pen fully charged; his apartment in Mumbai fully stocked, but also that the piles of henchmen he leaves in his wake disappear discretely; all without getting any credit whatsoever.

And you thought your job sucked.