I Know Nothing About This Field, But I Know You DON’T DO THAT

I work in security. I arrived at my post today to find a new directive on how to handle packages. Basically, if there’s no name associated with the delivery and none of the three listed managers know anything about it, turn the delivery away at the gate.

“Why has this come about?” you might ask. Well…

A couple of days ago, in a large city in Texas, USA, at 01:45, a man delivered a briefcase to the door guard at a media station. He claimed it was for the newsroom. The guard who accepted the briefcase is a subcontractor of the same national company I work for, and I guard another location of the same media conglomerate in a different state.

Later, the station got a call that it might be a bomb.

As my site supervisor was telling me the story, I was thinking, “Get as much information from the caller as possible. Then, make an overhead page for evacuation, call 911, call the supervisor, and go through the building making sure people are out. Meet the bomb squad, take them to the briefcase, and get the bleep out of there myself.”

This guard in Texas decided to open the briefcase. Yes, really.

Luckily, it wasn’t really a bomb.

The guard has been “reassigned” away from that post and is likely to be fired from the major, national, well-known guard company.