Thursday, October 25, 2007

Bomb Scare


The other night after dinner Guay and I sat around the dining room table recalling some of the craziest moments of our lives. Trust me we've had alot of them since meeting up in college six years ago. The one that still makes us laugh until we cry is this one....

Back in the day when 9/11 was still an open festering wound in NYC and we were living life based on color alerts and every bag, brief case and knap sack were viewed as a potential bomb Guay and I were working as photographers at The Empire State Building. It goes without saying that as an office building and official home of King Kong the place is always packed with tourists.

Guay had the day off and had just walked in to pick me up from work when a “suspicious package” in the form of a book bag was spotted. The police secured the area while waiting for the bomb squad to arrive and the building was shut down and evacuated. As employees it fell on us to get the “civilians”(tourists)out before we left. All we were told was to evacuate there was a bomb scare. We were never informed that it was all going down on our floor I guess they didn’t want us to freak out.

When the bomb squad arrived they stormed the building with the precision of a military unit executing an invasion. We’d already gotten all the tourists off of our floor and were in the process of checking the employee areas for any strays when we were told to hang back for a second while the bomb squad checked everything out. Just as one of the bomb squad guys was approaching the book bag the door to one of the bathrooms swung open and one of our employees came out with her music blasting on her headphones. She was oblivious to what was going on and made a beeline straight to the book bag on the floor bending over to pick it up. The cops yelled, “NO!” but she didn’t seem to hear. It was all the hand waving that got her attention ...that and the fact a small battalion of cops was rushing towards her made her pull off head phones. She flinched and clutched the bag to her chest and in her thick Turkish accent she yelled out, ”WHAT?! This is my bag! I forgot it!” Everyone groaned and a few audible curses coming from the cops and bomb squad were heard. She stared at everyone around her and kept repeating, “ What did I do?” as she was led off the cops.

In the middle of all this some serious laughter could be heard.The laughter of two females laughing so hard that they gasped for air, and kept repeating “oh shit, oh shit!” as they slapped each other high fives and held onto each other for dear life to prevent them from falling over from the laugher. Yeah the females were Guay and me and the fact that we nearly laughed ourselves to death did not amuse the cops.

Labels: bomb scare, friends, guay and me, laughter

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