kaboom

 [Alternate title via Franklin: AND BOOM GOES THE DYNAMITE]

Yesterday morning I awoke to an email that basically said this: Faculty. There's been a bomb threat. The affected building and adjoining parking lot are closed.

Seriously!? Well, that's obnoxious. People can really suck sometimes.

Less than 30minutes later, at 7:56am, another email was sent out stating that classes in a nearby academic building were to be canceled until 11am. That seemed all fine and dandy until I realized that our intro class had an exam in that building at 10am. I bet a bunch of students were thrilled with the announcement.

Our intro coordinator jumped into action and sent out an email to our students letting them know they had 3 options for taking the exam: 1) take it at 10am as scheduled, but in the psychology building, 2) take it at 12:15pm in the psychology building, or 3) take it 10am Friday during normal class hours. This email was sent at 8:42am.

At 8:56am the school sent out an email stating that everything was all clear, the buildings were reopening and classes that had previously been canceled were now resuming at 9am. Does anyone else see a problem with this? First, 4minutes of lead time is probably not enough for students to actually get to class when most of them probably went back to bed anyway. Second, our exam was back on! Our initial email was sent 14minutes too soon!! Imagine the chaos.

We ended up sending another email to our students telling them the Friday option was out and that they had to take the exam either 1) in class at 10am, 2) in our building at 10am, or 3) in our building at 12:15pm. Shockingly, all 80 students managed to show up and not argue that they should now also have Friday.

It was quite the chaotic morning... and not even due to the drama of a bomb threat, but just the rescheduling due to a bomb threat. Otherwise, everything seemed normal. I wouldn't have even known anything was off (e.g., that something might explode) had it not been for all of those emails. The rest of campus/classes were as if nothing was happening. It wasn't even much of a conversation topic later in the day.

There's been no word on if they know who called it in or why. I can only assume that's being looked into. But here's an interesting piece of information: While students were told to keep away from the academic building where classes were canceled, they didn't actually evacuate the faculty/staff. Actually, the staff (e.g., office assistants) didn't even know that classes were canceled...