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Being that very little ever happens around here, I went out the back and around the buildings, across the street to rubber-neck this one. Next to our building in the lot was a small case with a handle, looked like an ammo case but with what looked like a leather finish, and some wires sticking out of it.
We're chuckling over it, we have street people and litterbugs galore here, it's probably nothing. 20 minutes later they had the entire main drag blocked off - at the worst time of day - and sure enough the bomb squad shows up complete with armored suits and robots.
So I'm sitting here, back at work, thinking "meh . . . nothing . . . " and BANG comes this loud explosion sound . . . what the heck . . .
Wife was watching from the car lot across the street. Maybe it's protocol, but they had picked up the "parcel" and carried it up the street, then detonated it voluntarily. Guess we'll never know what was in the box.
Whatever it was, after it was all over, wife walks into the office. The whole time it was going on (after my initial peek) I was just sitting here working away. "What the **** are you doing in here, you're not supposed to be in here!" Apparently we were supposed to evacuate the building. <<oops>>
<shrug> I never got the memo. LOL . . .
Too bad, no application can deliver the smell of cordite...
Ahh, I get it, it was a MKTG stunt :)
And when the device was disintegrated; tons of your biz logos were released to be carried away by the local breeze!
If the cops were all around the place how did you manage to come close by the "bomb"?
We're in a big building, my "office" is a space one the exact back/opposite corner of the building from where the box was left. They came in and just told us they were going to close off the street and tell the businesses to close.
I went back to work, no one came in after that and announced we should leave. I thought nothing of it until I heard the bang. LOL . . . <oops>
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street
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--------------- box
--building-----
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X--------------
^ me
About 20 years ago, I worked as PR/Marketing sort of guy at a big London transport company. We'd decided to do a marketing campaign to the top 1,000 companies in London and it took the form of a mailshot.
This was a box inside of which were two tin cans attached by a bit of string - the old tin can telephone thingy.
Anyway, not only did we decide to send this package to the biggest companies in London, but we also marked it for the attention of the Chief Exec's. Are alarm bells starting to ring yet?
Well, that's exactly what did happen! Alarm bells went off all over London. As Piatkow points out, back then people were very suspicious of mystery packages for a number of very good reasons.
I recall that a number of packages were treated with great suspicion and we later learnt something that we should have known all along - that the post of many senior execs went through X-ray machines. We received a good number of very irate phone calls and letters of complaint from a lot of very high places!
I also recall that at least one corporate HQ in central London was evacuated that day and the bomb squad called because of our tin can mailshot.
The inspiration for the campaign came from an agency that caught our attention by doing a similar type of attention-grabbing mailshot, except in theirs they'd used a .45 calibre bullet!
Perhaps we should have sensed trouble right from the start :-)
Syzygy
While we were never concerned, to the point of kidding around about it, I have to offer kudos to the local gendarmes and the OSP for being equipped to manage this sort of a crisis, even in our little berg which is in a rural area. It's just too bad that the world has become a place where paranoia is the default behavior . . . .
