An urgent voice came over the intercom: “All personnel evacuate the building immediately!”
Agents quickly stuck their heads into my classroom door at the parole office to see if I needed help clearing the students from the room. I grabbed my indispensable possessions—backpack, coffee mug, and iPhone charger—and despite the urgency of the message, casually stopped by to use the restroom on the way out.
This was our second bomb threat on two successive Tuesdays, so the novelty had worn off. That’s why I assembled my belongings and executed the evacuation at a leisurely pace.
Six months ago, we had our first bomb threat, and my evacuation tactics were far less polished. I had bolted from the chair, bruising my thigh on the low-hanging desk drawer, barely concealing my semi-panicked plea for students to exit—quickly, please! We had hustled to the far side of the parking lot, speculating about how long we would be outside, and was there really a bomb? If so, who had planted it and why? Creative conjecture ran rampant. What if the building blew up? Were we far enough away to not risk injury? To top it off, I then realized—I had to urgently use the restroom!
But there was no such anxiety this time. I was a seasoned veteran—an experienced bomb-scare advisor. I knew it would take two-and-a-half hours for the bomb-sniffing dog to arrive and run its course through the building with promises of puppy-treats dancing in its brain for a job well-done. A final rooftop sweep would signal the final “all clear.” By that time, I could easily hike the three-quarters of a mile to Starbucks, sip a Cafe Americano, check my e-mail messages, and leisurely return. So I did.
As I walked, I wondered. Who could have called in this parole office bomb scare? A discontented parolee? An agent threatened with job loss because of agency downsizing? A cleaning crew contractor, disgruntled by ongoing cockroach wars?
I was determined to discover who the culprit might be.
After my hike back from Starbucks, I still had time to kill. So I opted for pancakes at Dennys, where I discovered a glut of other refugee staff members from the parole office, killing time, sipping coffee, munching on selections from the Breakfast Specials section of the menu.
And then the obvious conclusion struck me.
I’m no detective. But I can sniff out a Denny’s manager who’s just a bit too eager to bloat a day’s profit from the misfortune of traumatized, bomb-threatened parole staff, fattening his income with my humble short stack of wheat pancakes and the surrounding sea of parole agents downing oversized three-egg Spanish omelets and greasy hashed brown potatoes.
The Denny’s manager – he’s the one calling in the bomb threats.
Oh, yeah.