" "Eventually I told him I refused to believe there was a bomb here and if he had genuinely planted a bomb somewhere he should find out the right number and call in a warning ASAP before it went off." "

Then he did a back flip.

A physical description.

From a phone call.

There is no way anyone can infer anything physical from a voice over radio or phone. I cannot begin to count the times have I heard someone's voice on the radio, only to be shocked when I found a pic or a YouTube video featuring that person.

Some people sound younger than they are, some sound much more mature, and being fat or not is not something you can detect by voice alone (let's not even mention height).

Most of the time, the one and only physical trait you can possibly derive just by voice is whether that person is male or female (and even then, it can be tricky).

Short answer : that was a stupid question.

I'm a soft spoken bloke, and I've long given up correcting anyone who calls me "ma'am"/"miss" on the phone. It's not a big deal to me personally, and it just wastes so much time listening to them getting embarrassed and apologising.

"Irish"

"Short answer : that was a stupid question."

Security goons are rarely the sharpest tools in the box.

When I was at school, in Belfast, we occasionally had to evacuate due to bomb scares. One time three six form boys decided they wanted an afternoon off classes so they phoned in a bomb threat. They used the payphone in the school so we did not evacuate. The school managed to identify who they were but they did get the afternoon off classes. Unfortunately, for them, they spent the afternoon at Castlereagh Holding Centre having a chat with the police.

We had a bomb scare at work about 12 or so years ago. I was working at a bank and banks weren't particularly popular at the time for various reasons. I was watching as people were spoken to quietly before they exited the building and eventually they reached our bank of desks and advised us to leave the building. So we did. Then we mingled about outside the building chatting about what was going on and I looked up at the building we'd just evacuated. With its massive glass front. Pondering how much damage that glass would do if it did explode outwards at most of the staff from the building...

Evidently, someone else came to the same conclusion and we were ushered off to a nearby park area out of the blast radius, just in case.

Few hours later, the alert was declared a hoax and we got back into the building, although a number of folks had just headed off home by that point. The "bomb evacuation" procedures were sent round the company to make sure folk knew to not hang about outside the potentially explosive offices...

a few years ago they had a fire alarm test and everyone trooped downstairs and mingled around the entrance to the car park.

"You're all dead!"

The safety rep then gave a lecture on the need to keep the entrance clear for emergency vehicles and, the the case of a bomb or explosion, to keep clear in case of flying debris

> I was working at a bank and banks weren't particularly popular at the time for various reasons.

Were they ever?

Our lot had a sensibly distant fire evac spot, but we were told that for bomb threats you needed to evac a much larger minimum distance, away from any other likely targets as well.

At the time, the only suitably-distant spot they could find near our city-centre office was a cemetery, leading to some morbid jokes about how, if even this proved not to be far enough away, we'd be saving some time on the burials.

I worked for a company that traded with South Africa when it was still very much an apatheid country. I was sitting in my office when one of the men I shared it with said "I think you should get out of the room, now, and get security, the police and the bomb squad" It seemed a strange and rather random thing to say, even for the early 80's. When I inquired as to why, he told me that he had started to open an envelope (this is pre email!) which had wires in it, and what he thought might be a battery.

So, I left, told security, who evacuated that area (note - work must go on, so not the whole building). Police came, and told him to throw it out of the window whilst diving under the desk. They then retreated to a safe distance. None of this covering up with a blast blanket, or a man in an armour suit deciding to cut the red or the yellow wire. Oh no. Just throw the package away and dive under the dek. Well, the desk was an old, heavy oak one that had definitely survived the war!

It did not go off. If it had done, several people walking along the Strand would have needed new underwear.

If a bomb is an a large envelope (say 250 grams weight) then in the real (non movie) world there is a limit to the amount of damage that amount of pure explosives could cause, and the battery and wiring for the detonator is going to reduce the amount of explosives that are possibly in it. Which is to say it could convert part of a desk to flying splinters, but it wouldn't exactly do any structural damage so people on floors above and below are quite safe. The idea with a letter bomb is that somebody is holding it in their hands when its set off, and if they aren't then it's hardly going to do much.

Now if you have a box delivered on a pallet that you think is a bomb, then that's rather more worth evacuating the building and neighbourhood over...

... but it seems to fit here, so here it is again. Feel free to skip it if you've already read it.

The story begins bright and early one fine morning many moons ago, maybe 1983. I was on the roof of the old Ford Aerospace Building One on Fabian in Palo Alto, trying to re-align a new laser network link to a building across Hwy 101. I got tackled by a couple largish MPs ... Seems that some military big-wigs were about to arrive to inspect one of our satellites (unlaunched, being built in the high-bay), and the two security guys heard someone talk about "jake's up on the roof with the laser, that should sort 'em out". Myself and the two talking about me were detained, taken to a small room & questioned. Seems the security detail wasn't all that versed in the power output of a 5mW HeNe laser; in their tiny little brains we were conspiring to roast the brass.

We had the last laugh. The laser link was part of the demo that the brass was there to observe. We were "rescued" from the grilling after about an hour, and allowed to get on with it. The security guys got a very public dressing-down from a rather technologically cluefull Colonel (in full dress) for wasting his time ... After we concluded the demo, the Colonel sent the security guys to get pizza for lunch and sat & ate with us, discussing the ins & outs of "modern" wireless (laser) networking.

Back in the 80s while working for a Large Government Department, bomb threats were taken very seriously as the IRA had demonstrated motivation and effectiveness on several occasions. One afternoon a large parcel arrived addressed to the director of data processing (as they were known in the way-back-when). It was a heavy parcel, there was no return address, no indication of the sender and it wasn't an expected delivery. The post room followed procedure and called it in. The office was evacuated and the bomb disposal squad were round in a flash - they were based a couple of miles down the road. After assorted jiggery-pokery the package was declared safe and opened. It contained a consignment of leaflets describing the current procedure for handling suspicious parcels.

There was also the central London Territorial Army (army reserves) hall that was under a 'black bikini' alert (suggested dress code = brown trousers) that received a mystery parcel

I believe they actually carried out a controlled explosion, but again it contained leaflets on how to deal with bomb threats

A couple of personal tales...

I worked for a number of years in a tall building in central London that was technically classified an 'Official Secret', despite being the tallest building in London for a good few years. We once discovered that the surrounding streets had been cordoned off and offices, including parts of the hospital and university buildings opposite, had been evacuated due to a bomb threat... we had just been told to keep away from the windows! Union reps went ballistic and wanted to know why we hadn't been evacuated. The reply was logical... we don't know if it is real... you could be evacuating INTO the danger area... you are in a big strong building... it's your workplace and you are likely to spot anything out of place... just keep away from glass

The other example was that I was travelling on a bus that got diverted out of the Camden Lock area. It transpired that there had been a warning that an IRA fire bomb had been planted outside the McD in Camden Town and police had evacuated the area... unfortunate they had made a mistake in the warning and it was actually planted a couple of hundred yards away outside KFC and many of those people 'evacuating to safety' would have wandered up to Camden Lock, passing KFC on the way! Luckily it was not much more than a firework and I believe the only casualty was the litter bin it was placed in

(I've given both examples to 'safety reps' who insist we should evacuate to a 'place of safety' for a bomb threat)

It wouldn't be the first time deliberately confusing or incorrect information was given in a bomb threat. Also - see Warrenpoint - placing a device at a known or obvious evacuation point.

I direct your attention to Warrington's Bridge Street, in March 1993.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington_bombings

A friend of mine grew up in Abingdon UK and went to school by bus. One day, on arriving at school he found that he no longer had his school bag with him. Meanwhile, the RAF had spotted a suspicious item next to a bus stop on the edge of RAF Abingdon, sent in a robot and given the bag a couple of blasts with the shotgun....

It happened to a friend of my daughter, who dropped his backpack by the school's entrance while he played nearby with his mates - this being the day after the shooting at the Bataclan, terrorist alert was at a maximum, but sending the bomb squad for a backpack left at a school door? Seems a bit over the top....

Story I read ages ago somewhere...

In among all the university buildings on Oxford Road in Manchester is (or was) the National Computing Centre. It was a fairly high profile building and an occasional target during the Troubles in the 70s and 80s. One day someone went past, dropped a bag full of batteries and wires, and ran off. They called the police and got the bomb squad out. After a brief investigation they were allowed back in. It wasn't someone trying to blow the place up, but a shoplifter who had nicked a load of stuff from Maplin just up the road.

Ahh. Maplin. Those were the Days!

Has your work ever been interrupted by a security scare?

Yes, but I cannot speak about it, because ------>