How did you spend your afternoon?

Unless you work where I work, I bet you weren't standing outside in the rain while dogs sniffed your facility for "threats". That's how I spent the afternoon, which made the local news (PDF).

The funny part about this story is that I had my team in a conference room with the door closed for a staff meeting, and no one told us they had evacuated the building, at least not right away. Sometime after the initial evacuation, someone poked their head into the conference room door and said, "hey, did you know there was a bomb scare and the building has been evacuated?"

Needless to say, that put an end to our staff meeting. As we ventured outside, there were already squad cars all over the place. After checking in with our organizational contact, we stood outside in the rain for awhile before figuring it was about lunch time anyway. Of course, then there was the awful traffic because, as it turns out, that idea wasn't so original. I figured at least the situation would be cleared up by the time we got back from lunch. But that was not a correct assumption. More rain standing was in order. Strangely, it always seems to happen this way. In the eight years (next week) I've worked here, there's been a dozen or more "threat scenarios" that involved us going outside at less than optimal times, usually during bad weather of some sort. Couldn't we ever evacuate on perfect spring day?