Public Issues

One of the facts of working on a bomb squad is that the vast majority of our calls are false alarms - a simple abandoned bag, a package sent to the wrong location or whatever. While it's somewhat of a downer in terms of not dealing with live stuff, that's the nature of the beast. However, it also is a fact that we still have to treat EVERY call as if it IS live - because as soon as you get complacent thinking "oh, this is just another nothing incident" it will end up biting you. 

What this means is that, once we get on scene, we treat things very seriously - from controlling scene and traffic access, to possible evacuations, to the whole robot/bomb suit/special equipment game. This tends to be time consuming, and disruptive and everything else. Because my concern is the safety of me, the community, the other officers and everything else - not whether or not this is "convenient" to everything else around. 

Usually everyone is pretty understanding of this and realizes why we do things. But this past week we had Captain Sarcasm on board - because we had to block off the entrance to his commercial area in order to deal with a suspect package, and he just couldn't see all the fuss going on for what ended up being nothing. So, while I spent an hour resolving this situation, worrying about potential risks and countermeasures in my head, and everything else involved, he spent his time on the sidelines yelling out smart-assed comments, suggestions, and even going so far as to complain to the patrol supervisor on scene about all of this "nonsense." 

Fortunately for my temper and my career I was able to get things done and leave in a different direction, so that my mouth didn't add to the problem in a direct encounter...