The cops showed up at my office this morning (4/17/98), actually just one. He was trying to find out who was responsible for a bomb scare that sent some of the workers in payroll on the upper campus home. He was a good cop. It only took him 45 seconds before he broke me down and I had to confess, "It was me, I did it".
It all started during the last Laguna San Ignacio field trip. We couldn't find the anchor near the mouth of the lagoon where we deploy a RDI 150 kHz ADCP Broadband. The chief scientist decided we should deploy it at one of our other measurement sites. That required modifying a bottom pressure sensor cage to hold the ADCP. I spent a day doing a classic kluge and wound up with a Broadband taped, band-ited, and tied to a cage that had been partially sawed in half. I took a couple of photographs of it, and the chief scientist mentioned that he would like one as an example of the desperate measures you can be driven to in the field. Early this week I grabbed one of the photos and a routing envelope from my pile to carry it in so it wouldn't get fingerprints all over it. I send out more things in routing envelopes than I receive, so I sometimes get a pile of them from a random source. The last place this one had been was payroll.
When I got down to the chief scientist's office, there was a wedge of people in his doorway so I gave the envelope to our system administrator to give to him. When our system administrator went into the chief scientist's office, the chief scientist wasn't there so he put it on the his keyboard. When the chief scientist came back, he didn't recognize the envelope, so he put it in the campus mail which sent it back to payroll, the last address on the front.
Someone in payroll opened the envelope and out fell the photograph which they immediately recognized as a bomb threat. Eighteen people were sent home for safety reasons, and they called the cops. As I said the cop is pretty good. With only the photograph, he found his way to an engineer across the street who identified it as an ADCP and sent the cop to me. I expect to get out of jail in time to retire.
Paranoia strikes deep.
Into your heart it will creep.
It starts when your always afraid.
Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away.
- Buffalo Springfield
The picture that started it all!