Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Terror threat

So my work place had a terror exercise. A simulation that starts by someone calling in a bomb threat. Since I knew when this was going to happen, I planned a trip to an external location for that time. I had work to do.

"But you should take part of the exercise, too!" the complaints came. "Everyone should take part of the exercise."

So in this exercise, I'm supposed to walk out of the building and do nothing. What am I supposed to tell the remote location? "I'm sorry, I can't come and fix your network connection today, because I have been ordered to stand in the parking lot, kicking some stones instead of doing my job?"

We left through the back door minutes before the exercise started.

1 comment:

Alphapenguin said...

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. The odds of you being away during a real threat would be about the same as you being away during an exercise.

And, how to tell people that are out on location not to come back should be part of the procedures tested in the exercise.

The fact you specifically scheduled your visit to coincide with the exercise may be considered an effort to undermine it and thus ethically questionable, but in reality it's a moot point for the reasons I just listed.