Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation Welcome again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed tale of being asked to hold in your rage while dealing with the effluent of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Brian" who told us about the time he was called into central London to install some audio-visual hardware at a government …
Egg mayo sandwiches made by well meaning teachers, wrapped in foil, and left in a hamper in the sun for several hours...
...can be very dangerous. We didn't all make it back to school before the explosiveness started, but being the 80s we were made of stronger stuff so we had some pains, some unpleasantness, and then spent weeks ridiculing each other.
So, yeah, watch out for sandwiches especially in this hot weather. They can fight back.
A chum of Mrs Marmite had cause to be highly embarrassed a while back. Chum and her hubbie were heading off on holiday in Paris and were trying to get directions. They strayed just that wee bit too far from one suitcase and were preoccupied enough with working out where to go, that they didn't notice the police cordon being hastily thrown around said suitcase.
Cue hurried and intensive negotiations with the bombe squad, including describing the case's contents, before le fuzz allowed the red-faced tourists to retrieve their luggage and scuttle off.
It happened to a friend of my daughter, who dropped his backpack at the school's gates 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....
Reminds me of the time, back in the 1980's when my boss flew to the Middle East for a meeting with one of our teams working there. We were one of the large oilfield service companies and the team also needed a freewill plug shipped. This was a simple piece of kit that could be dropped into oil well casing and fall to a specific point where it would form a seal - applying pressure to the fluid above the seal would then actuate a valve. To help it fall, it was shaped like the archetypical aircraft freewill bomb: pointed at the front, with fins at the back - and in the company's informal parlance it was referred to, simply, as a bomb. The one needed by our team was daily small and my boss agreed to take it in his checked luggage.
No problem until he went through customs on arrival and was asked what was in his luggage - out of habit, he used our informal name for it...
We did get him back, albeit suitably chastened by the experience (though he refused to give us details of exactly what happened)!
I had this trick of getting on the train, seated, DVD player playing & cold beer in hand 5 minutes before they opened the gates on the main concourse.
I had noted one of the first passengers drop off his coat & briefcase in his seat, but paid him little heed.
Three minutes out of Paddington, someone queried the briefcase & coat on a seat, I admitted I hadn't seen the passenger since everyone started boarded & this being a week or two after the 7/11 bombings the train manager was advised, the train pulled into a stop at Acton, platform already occupied by armed police as the train manager announced the unscheduled stop, no one was to leave the train & if the owner of the coat & case could make himself known.
After some minutes this rather annoying plummy voice loudly broadcasted his arrival (With 75% of the passengers suffering whiplash as they turned their heads rapidly with undisguised hate & contempt as they sought to see the moron who had caused this terror incident) as he entered coach C or B "I say! Is ALL this fuss over my coat & case while I went to have a drink with my chums in first class!"
After a "discussion" in the vestibule area, the train carried on it's way & he returned to First Class (Leaving coat & case again), very obviously the cause of the alert as he made his way through the carriage & I imagine similar looks & comments of hate followed him both ways.
As the train emptied I was very tempted to dispose of bag & coat somewhere out of the window as the train passed through the Somerset levels, he collected his shit 90 seconds before the train hit Taunton.
That wasn't Mr 'I was time-machined from Queen Victoria's England to current day Somerset' Rees-Mogg, was it? Because it sounds awfully like him. On second thought, he'd probably be slumming it in First, not Standard. Couldn't possibly be mixing with the great unwashed, now could he.
I live in UK, I have a room I call "bathroom" without a bath (it has a shower instead).
Though TBF, I have another room with just a toilet and washbasin, that room gets called "toilet" - so would agree that in UK bathroom would mean it also has a "proper" body washing facility such as a bath or shower
> I have another room with just a toilet and washbasin, that room gets called "toilet"
In my youth, New Jersey 1960s, in a new house, the piss and rinse was a "Powder Room". Also known as a half bath or guest bath. Apparently the original Powder Rooms of the 18th century did not feature a toilet (that was outside).
"Bathroom" is the universal euphemism, though as said above, can lead to confustion. (But who would steer a clean guest to a bath-only room without more info??) "Restroom" is also universal if you don't need a body-wash-- gas-stations, fast-food emporiums, restaurants.
Three Dog Night told us: "There's a bathroom on the right". (This was half-true in the developments I grew up in: there were two basic floor plans which could be flopped mirror-image to make four basic house models, half had bath on left.)
Three Dog Night told us: "There's a bathroom on the right".
Are you sure you're not thinking of Creedence Clearwater Revival, with their well-known Mondegreen from Bad Moon Rising?
See also Jimi Hendrix and "'scuse me while I kiss this guy", and my personal favourite, Enya with the chorus of Orinoco Flow: "Save a whale, save a whale, save a whale..."
Trust me, once you've read those words, you'll never hear them singing anything else.
Well in the UK there is such a thing as a lavatory, which you would find in your toilet.
Except lavatory comes from "lavatorium" which was the communal washing area in a monastery. And toilet comes from "toilette" which was a small cloth used to cover clothes when shaving and got extended to cover the whole personal grooming area. So, washroom seems as appropriate as lavatory, or even bathroom.
Last time I checked, a bathroom was still a bathroom and a crapper was still a toilet. I do recall a little story of a friend of my English teacher back then. Thinking of it, it may well have been someone who told this to my teacher about the sister of a third-degree cousin's former fellow worker. Anyway, her friend was invited for tea at a posh English family. When pressure rose, she wanted to sound poshish and asked for "the bathroom". And was duly shown the bathroom. No toilet there. Too embarrassed to ask again for a toilet, she climbed onto the sink to relieve herself. Slipped, fell down, hit her head, panties down, remained unconscious for a while, until the hosts got worried and checked for her...
Language may evolve. But language matters.
People laughed at my language when I arrived in another post-colonial country. I used the wrong words, with the wrong pronunciation. I realized than that the country I had arrived in did not "own" English: there were far more English speaking people in India, or in the USA, than in the country I had arrived in, and those versions of English were just as valid as the English of the country I had arrived in.
Of course, the corollary of that is that other countries also don't own English: when the other country changes the spelling of Bombay, or of Peking, we don't any special right to tell them how to spell their words, and they don't have any special rights to tell us how to spell, or pronounce, or name Bombay, or Peking, or Paree, or Deutchland.
Exceopt of course, for those who still yearn for the time when the sun never set on the English Empire.
Honestly, I've worked in all sorts of buildings which have been converted from one use to another over the years, and it wouldn't surprise me to find a bath tucked away somewhere in an old government office. Probably in a tiny room somewhere where there's no access to remove said bath without knocking down walls.
Yes, it will be sealed off from civilisation but not before someone has installed a server in there as nowhere else was suitable or available. It will sit there doing its job for years without issue until someone finally decides to upgrade that old Netware 3.12 box to something a bit more modern - except they won't be able to find it until they physically trace the CAT-5 cable through a wall.
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The bomb scare was in a pub, so (presumably) not the building our hero was locked in.
Government buildings tend to have some security measures against external blast, so it was presumably viewed as safer to keep everyone in the building than let them out on the street, where they would be more vulnerable to the (suspected) bomb that was found - or the possible second bomb that hadn't yet been found.
Bomb alert evacuations seem nowadays to be 'evacuate the building and disperse', rather than 'evacuate and assemble at the fire assembly point' specifically to avoid the risk of creating a target (the assembled evacuees) for a second, better hidden, bomb.
Still, I'm pretty sure I've met some jobsworth types that would lock you in a small room if that's what the rules said, regardless of logic, and since it's Friday, have a >>
When I visited our department headquarters in London I was surprised to see that all externam windows had overlong net curtains, which were usually covered in dust and looked terrible with several extra feet of fabric bunched up on the floor.When I asked why they didn't get the right sized curtains, I was told that it was an anti-blast precaution - if a bomb went off and the windows were blown in, the curtains would catch much of the flying glass - at the edge of the extra fabric lead weights were sown in to help contain tehshards. Apparently this is a very effective method of protecting people inside the buildings
Correct, I went to a school in Northern Ireland facing a police station in the 90s and we had something similar on windows facing the station, although rather than curtains to the floor, the lead and spare material as in a trough on the windowsill.
Those little weights made excellent missiles to shoot with a catapult...
I worked for a while in BBC Television Centre - a building which had had a bomb go off outside so had properly considered these issues.
The building had "Internal Shelter Areas" (not sure if that's the actual term), and if there was a bomb threat you were sent to one of those.
Generally interior corridors with no windows.
We had one of those when I 'worked' for the government.
"Glass free refuge" it was called...
But since we were working about 600 yrds from where the russians were aiming a 50Kt nuclear weapon..........
Although one of the science guys did work out that those inside the shelter would live an extra 250 milliseconds longer than anyone outside. factor 10 million sunblock anyone?
You can see them on the google maps tour of TV centre if you want. At some of the datacentres I've been in they have similar areas called "invacuation" areas.
assuming we weren't talking N°2's, a jug, a pen cup or two behind a desk, failing a convenient potted Aspidistra* can provide relief at a pinch. Even a sheet of 80gm A4 paper with a little origami can provide an ad hoc recepticle.
In Oz we might make it someone else's problem: "Choose a wall mate."
Believe me nothing in this world is worth suffering an avoidable kidney or urinary tract infection.
* of the multitude of species alternativa, elation or bogneri could be most à propos.
I used to work in a high security environment where all internal doors had magnets and you could only go into rooms your pass allowed, even the MDs toilet had a card reader.
My boss, being a coward, never liked putting reports on the MDs desk, so he made me do it, and made my pass essentially access all areas, I could even use the MDs toilet now!
So, one day I was dropping the kids at the pool in the MDs loo, when the access control computer had a brain fart and locked all the doors, so I was trapped for 4 hours in the MDs toilet, slowly suffocating due to the automatic air freshener blasting me every 10 minutes.
I had the low tech version of this as a child; sibling desperate to pee breaks the door handle and I'm stuck in there until my Dad got home. No air freshener to worry about. Managed to receive a delivery of a book, and a plate with my dinner on, through the tiny window. Could have been worse.
I think the bomb squad just like getting their toys out to have a play.
1980s - my mate forgot he left his school books on the steps outside Barclays bank. Went to cinema. Came out at end of film to find the town square locked down and the bomb squad poking at this bag.
2022 - I live behind a university building. Got front row seats when bomb squad turned up with their little robot and full metal suit to blow up someone's abandoned sandwich bag. The black plastic bag had actually been sitting in that position for a week before they decided to blow it up.
Entertaining to watch. What worried me with that one is they evacuated the solid Victorian university building and the building site, but ignored us in the houses who looked straight at the "bomb".
I bet more sandwiches have been blown up than bombs.
Oh $DIETY... that takes me back to my school days in the late 1960s and a classmate whose surname was something like Donague. His nickname had transitioned through Dongo, Pongo and finally settled onto Whiff - and, yes, he did live up to that name. He had been absent through illness on the last day of term. As I sat next to him, it became my job to tidy up the contents of his desk as well as my own. Unfortunately, he did have a habit of not eating the sandwiches that his mother would dutifully make for him each day. These he would store in the desk alongside his books (exercise, reference and hymn*). I seem to remember there were several day's worth of uneaten cheese sandwiches which, once the desk lid was opened, was accompanied by cries of horror as the pong wafted around the classroom.
* The hymn book he had kept especially to occasionally show us the exact page upon which, during one particular morning assembly, he had thrown up onto. On that fateful morning, I had been standing directly to his left but I'm glad to say that he had aimed his stomach contents mainly into the hymn book itself and partially to his right, much to the chagrin of the boy in that direction whose school blazer caught a good proportion of Whiff's deliverance.
The idea of a controlled explosion is to blow the components of a bomb apart, without actually setting it off. Could work for the artisanal ANFO type, where the fertiliser bags could be scattered but not detonated.
In Belfast we got to know the sounds:
- two-tone sirens followed 20 minutes later by small bang = successful controlled explosion
- two-tone sirens followed 20 minutes later by large bang = oops, but at least the area had been evacuated
- large bang followed by two-tone sirens = oh shit, time to check where your friends are.
When I was a member of a defence organisation (unarmed), we were expecting delivery of our new RFID identity cards. One day a mysterious brown paper package arrived at Group Headquarters, with no address or other identifying marks, and was placed in the foyer. When the Security Department returned from whatever they had been securing, they immediately ordered an evacuation and called the Bomb Squad. These gentlemen carefully removed the parcel to the middle of the car park and set off a "Controlled Detonation". Suddenly there was snowstorm of burnt shards of plastic as the several hundred new ID cards were instantly destroyed and blasted into the air. There were still a few bits stuck to the wire fence when we were stood down many years later.
Anyone who was active during the 70s and 80s in the UK will remember innumerable bomb scares - the vast majority hoaxes, with just enough real ones to make people take them seriously. The IRA used that tactic to waste police resources and, of course, upset a large number of people. I was evacuated a couple of times when a bomb warning was received for concerts; my sister-in-law was in a London mainline station when one of the real ones went off - fortunately, she wasn't near the blast.
More recently, the 7 July 2005 bus bombings happened when there was a conference being hosted by my organization in Cambridge. Large numbers of attendees were unable to return home as public transport through London was disrupted.
A consultant I knew in the 80's, parked a hire car in central London, after his meeting he went for drinks, had a few and did the right thing and got a lift. Arrived back the next day, to find the boys in blue had blown his boot open. Mountains of paperwork. Maybe his sandwiches were in there.
I once walked to lunch past the MI5 building. Outside, parked on double yellow lines, a white van and four officers with machine guns. They asked “is that van yours?” (but they probably asked everyone), I said “no”, walked past them very quickly, and went back to the office on a different way.
I think one white van driver probably got the worst telling off of his life.
I remember a similar occasion in Belfast, with a Dublin registered car parked in No Parking zone in the city centre. We were evacuated, controlled explosion left the now glassless vehicle looking like a puffed-up paper bag. As we passed once the alert was lifted we heard the owner saying to some less-than-amused police "But what am I going toI tell my husband, it's his car". She didn't get much sympathy...
Somehow, Wales and Scotland escaped (old but interesting link), so what is probably meant by "UK" is "England and Northern Ireland".
M.
I was on a bus a short distance away from one of the IRA's fire bombs.
They had phoned in an alert to say there was a fire bomb outside McD in the High St and police had moved people on. Many people had headed up to road to a tourist-trap market... only for the damp squib of a bomb to go off outside KFC in the market
My Godfather was "someone important" in the RAF in the late 60's/early 70s and living the life of Riley in a forces-supplied home (think Georgian mansion!), with a small support staff.
One morning a package turned up with what looked like a small black wire poking out of it....
Cue bomb-squad's immediate arrival, evacuation of said building, a very nerve-testing movement of the suspect package out of the building, followed by some impromptu garden re-modelling.
When the dust settled the remnants were inspected....
It was a hairbrush.
Obviously, this being the RAF, the offending item was immediately mounted in a lovely wooden and glass frame and decorated his office for the rest of his life. :D
Turns out the hairbrush was actually a joke gift sent by a friend and was just not very well wrapped!
(they obviously didn't use a huge amount of plastique to "detonate" the package because the wooden body still had a fair few bristles still embedded in it. I remember repeatedly chuckling about it whenever the story was told)
I believe a member of the Royal Family (could've been the Duke of Edinburgh, this was before t'internet was the knower of all things) ended up with their brand new Vauxhall blown up because they'd just bought it, parked it up (as you do), and their protection detail had not yet told anyone else about the new purchase. Cue royal protection patrol spotting said 'abandoned' vehicle, considering it a danger, and blowing it up. Red faces all round.
I was working once in the security department of a major Government department in London. Because of the nature of the stuff done there we were not allowed into the office unless a member of staff was present.
One day I went out for lunch and when I came back the office was closed and in darkness - I wasthen required to wait outside until a staff member came back from their lunch to let me in. I waited about 20 minutes before someone arrived to open up. We went in to find a member of staff already sitting at his desk. The lights in the office were fitted with movement sensors as a money saving measure - if no movement was detected for a few minutes they switched off.
The guy must lieraly not have moved a muscle when he was in there - I can only assume he was asleep.
I used to work in a corner of an office where the sensors weren't very good. They did not detect my normal movements and would switch off if I was the only one there. If they did this and I simply raised my arms and waved them, that wasn't enough movement to register from the corner, so they'd stay off. If I wanted them to go back on, I had to stand up and walk away from my desk, then walk back. While it was a good reminder when alone to stand up sometimes, there were other times when the thing I was debugging had gotten enough of my attention that I just lived with the darkness.
While working for a Large Government Department in the 1980s when the IRA used explosive methods of making their political point, there was much excitement when a large, unexpected parcel arrived. Procedures were followed - alarms, evacuation, bomb disposal squad, the full works. After being safely destroyed the parcel was found to contain a consignment of leaflets on how to deal with suspicious packages.
BAOR c1987, vehicle hangars Corunna Bks 26 Enr Regt evacuated becasue of a rectangular silver-foil wrapped package found on top of one of the 432s.
25Sqn lines evacuated as in direct line of sight of the hangar, every one piled into 30Sqn or the scoff house
EOD called, controlled detonation of a packet of sandwiches. :)
As I recall, it became a not-uncommon occurence after that
At this moment I remember being in a major datacentre in London. Whether it was one of Telehouse North or Brick Lane I can't remember. For those who don't know, the security went as follows: ~10 second scan of body part (can't remember whether 3d finger, or retina); slow open of "man trap" door; walk in to man trap and slow close of door behind; weighed by man trap; only then would the access controller take ~5-10 seconds to pause to decide if everything matched up and slowly open the front door of the man trap, or slowly open the door behind you for you to start again (without guidance as to issue).
I'd left it a little too long before leaving and refusing on principle to take in water I'd necked a bottle beforehand. I'd been trying to start an array building before leaving for a "comfort break" as I was on a tight deadline and didn't want to waste any time. I however didn't know that the door system was a bit finnicky. At the point of hopping from foot to foot, I finally got the array build underway and hopped to the door at a pace not befitting of a gentleman, but trying not to run in the datacentre.
It took me 13 attempts to get through the man trap. Why, I've no idea, as it wouldn't tell me. And then, I still had to find a badly signposted toilet...
A likely contender - bricked up windows, no external access, inconspicuous building etc.
What if there was a fire in the building that's locked down with no escape?
Heck, if you wanted to kill a lot of people it seems like setting up a bomb scare that will lock down a building would be a great way for an arsonist to insure they remain inside. All he'd have to do to insure mass death is disable the sprinkler system.
I used to live opposite a railway station that was also close to the local army barracks.
One morning I had a knock at the door and was told by a police woman to stay indoors and away from the windows due to a suspicious package on the platform. This put me in the opposite situation to this week's On Call hero: the only safe place in my studio flat was the bathroom*. Sometime later I heard a short crack (gunshot?) then a little while after that came the all-clear: someone's lunch had been made safe.
One of my best late-for-work excuses: the bomb-squad stopped me.
* Actually, I did leave the bathroom briefly and glimpsed a robot outside heading for the station.
After a quarter of a century working in offices with secure entry systems recording one's every coming and going I was made redundant and took a job in a school.
It soon became clear that although things were done strictly by the bell during term time working hours and even bothering to go in at all were optional during the holidays, even for those of us on full-time contracts.
One day I worked after the general lunchtime exodus and when I tried to leave found the exit doors locked. Through the window I could see the gates closed and locked too. I didn't have the appropriate keys or the site manager's phone number.
Fortunately the intruder alarm came to my rescue and the site manager arrived after a few minutes, accompanied by a police constable and I was saved from spending the night there.
It turned out the site manager decided that if his was the last car left it was time to lock up and go home. I lived close by and had decided to walk in that day.
From then on, I left a model car on his desk if I hadn't driven in.
At one time I used to make a lot of 'big bangs', think demolishing unexploded ordnance or what seems like them. To do so we always travelled as two convoys, one with detonators, another with explosive. To keep detonators at safe temperature and humidity, as they were a wee package about wrapped up 3 cigarettes size, I carried them either in my oxters (damp, humid, constant ltemperature) or in my groin (likewise) where risk of collision with other things was unlikely. Big 'Explosive' label on Land Rover. Got stopped by police who asked us to demount from vehicle, I replied only if you want all of us to be blown up, I sit still until engine is switched off for a few minutes. Policeman got angry. I removed a detonator, gave it to him and said, "if you shake that you lose your hand!", then rapidly moved away as did my driver. We lay flat on ground. Policeman was shocked. Stood still, another policeman came up (he was we think ex -army). Told him in no uncertain terms to not even breath, while he got others to gradually remove detonators from policeman. Long talks, all our paperwork was in order, our vehicle had appropriate warning signs, we departed leaving one policeman advising another in some basic explosive handling techniques.
In the 70s at the height of the IRA bombing campaign, I went with my older brother to Bristol Temple Meads train station to collect my father who had been on a business trip and we say a suitcase with no-one near it. Brother called the police and we got to witness some dumb idiot get a right dressing down when he came back for his suitcase.
In the 90s on Heathrow I notices Borgia King (IIRC) bag on a table, a fairly typical plain clothes seciurity bod standing a few meters away looking at everything, and some fit looking men lounging one floor up on a walkway, casually also looking at everything. The man who had left his lunch on a table while going to the bog got a (polite?) bollocking from the security bod.
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