Yesterday afternoon I followed my class as we exited the building for what I assumed was a false alarm fire drill. We stood out across the parking lot for a while, then herded kids to a nearby lot, and then we all went home without a chance to go back into the building for car keys or coats or homework.
Someone had called in a suspicious looking box attached to one of our fuel tanks. The police, the fire department, everyone came. They successfully disarmed the box, after about three hours.
It was a geocache, hidden in not a very smart place by someone who didn’t think of the possibly suspicious nature of the package and its placement.
All in all a good drill. I was relieved that it wasn’t someone trying to intimidate or play tricks. Just an honest mistake. All on the same day that another school went through the violent trauma of a shooting.
It reminded me of the high school kid here a couple years ago, who wanted to play a prank on one of his teachers. So he got an electronic metronome–the little bitty kind–and hid it very well in the teacher’s room (this teacher is a bit ADD and background noise drives him crazy).
Good joke. Except someone decided that the tick-tick-tick must be the timer on a bomb. The school was evacuated, the cops were called, and long story short, the kid almost got expelled from school with criminal charges brought against him…all for turning on a metronome.
Only a flurry of letters to the school board from teachers and community members attesting that this was an honest error of judgement–this kid wouldn’t hurt a fly, but his sense of humor does get away with him from time to time–kept him out of serious trouble.
All’s well that ends well, and things like this are funny as long as they turn out OK, but it is sort of sad to live in such a paranoid age.
At least the kid didn’t put a metronome in his geocache box. It was part of a geography exercise for class… now a whole new “teachable moment”!
I know what you mean about paranoia. That was one nice thing about the whole event, just sharing the gut feeling that there couldn’t possibly be a bomb at the school, that it had to be a joke or a mistake. This town just feels safe. Until there’s a national terrorist attack and people start talking about what a good target the pipeline terminal would be. Even so, I feel safe here.
Ill advised placement!