When getting the bombsquad called to school was a badge of honor

Murilee from Jalopnik sez, "After reading your post about the candy-ass school VP who freaked out over that kid's science project, I remembered my own similar experience in high school ('75 Ford seat-belt buzzer hooked up to batteries and put in a locker, which resulted in school evacuation). This was in 1983- before a handful of terrorists defeated us- which meant that A) my life wasn't ruined, B) I didn't have to get 'counseling,' C) it wasn't a national news story, and D) everyone thought it was pretty funny the next day."

Naturally, it didn't take me long to discover that 8 AAA batteries in a $2.99 Radio Shack holder will provide sufficient current to run a '75 Ford Elite seat belt buzzer all day long, and- in the mind of a 17-year-old under the influence of certain evil corruptors of youth just across the Bay- there really aren't too many mental steps between this realization and the idea of placing a battery-powered Ford seat belt buzzer in a high-school locker with the power switch in the ON position. BZZZEEEEEEEEEEEP!!! It'll drive everyone crazy! Ho ho!
So, a few hours later I'm in physics class, having already mostly forgotten about the maddening Malaise soundtrack issuing from my junkyard pal's locker (I could never remember my own locker's combination, so I stashed it in my friend Scott's locker), and my classmates notice some sort of commotion in the street outside. Cop cars all over the place! We're all crowding for a look out the window when several APD officers come into the classroom and ask the teacher to identify... me! Oh, shit! I get not-quite-frogmarched out of the room, it being clear that I'm in Big Fucking Trouble, and as I'm contemplating the reality that every wholesome Duran Duran-listening, lip-gloss enhanced girlie in the school will consider me a totally, radioactively untouchable, criminal for the rest of my high school days and probably- if I don't go to college in some other state- well beyond that, and I'm probably going to have to answer a lot of very pointed questions from the kind of humorless Authority Figures I dreaded most, it occurs to me that perhaps this whole hassle might have something to do with my harmless seat belt buzzer prank.

How My Youthful Junkyard Scrounging Habit Got My High School Evacuated By The Bomb Squad (Thanks, Murilee)

Previously:

Candy-ass vice-principal calls the bomb squad over an 11-year-old's science project, recommends counselling for the student
Boing Boing: Stickers: This is engineering, not bomb-making
Funny doctored science fair photos - Boing Boing
Science fair project on dangers of BB guns rejected b/c BB guns ...
Teen wins science fair with $300 spectrograph - Boing Boing
Boing Boing: Teen wins science fair with $300 spectrograph

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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- Osprey101
  
  Young man, this will go down on your Permanent Record ™.
- gollux
  
  Or an acetylene balloon on a long piece of string tied to a doorknob waiting to be pulled down via a wire loop into the embrace of a lighted candle.
- Aurini
  
  I remember shortly after the columbine shootings (and the following Taber attempted shootings) that the Principal of my High School asked me, and the other two trech-coat wearing guys, to refrain from dressing like that for a week.
  
  The next day I put away my “FBI Agent Mulder” coat and wore my “Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven” coat. I got a dirty look from the principle, but my explanation that Dusters aren’t Trenchcoats, after all, seemed to suffice.
  
  Small town Alberta might be socially backwards and scientifically illiterate, but they do tend to have a fair bit of common sense, at least.
- ill lich
  
  “Do you want the terrorists to win?!”
  
  It seems to me they have already won some sort of victory– as pointed out above, a handful of guys with box cutters reduced the USA to bunch of bed-wetters at the sight of anything that looks like a bomb, be it science project, hobby, guerilla marketing campaign, or bumper sticker that says “Car Bomb” on it. When the Boston Police flipped out over the Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED gizmos I could see the writing on the wall: now bomb scares happen everywhere for the most mundane of reasons, you can’t even take a photograph in public anymore without drawing suspicion.
  
  After 9/11 I looked around and saw that there was no way to stop them if they want to do damage; box cutters, how simple is that? Brainstorm over drinks with friends– the possibilities are endless.
  
  The terrorists aren’t afraid to die, why should I be afraid to die? We’re all going to die anyway, and it most likely won’t even come from a terrorist attack, but heart disease or a car crash.
  
  “Relax, you’ll live longer.”
  
  (I just wish governments would be more reasonable: we’re not going to stop terrorism by dropping bombs on rural villages or reducing Baghdad to ruins, any more than we “promoted democracy” by installing the Shah or Pinochet.)
- Chinese Jet Pilot
  
  We had a similar incident at my high school in the 80′s. A loud ticking sound from a locker resulted in the evacuation of the school. The bomb squad arrived and discovered a Walkman stuck on “rewind”. The clicking sound had been mistaken for a bomb timer.
  
  The authorities took no action, and school returned to normal the next day. Except that the student whose locker had been suspect sold airbushed “Bomb Scare ’88″ T-shirts between classes.
  
  If it had happened today, his academic career might have ended.
  
  Ceronomus
  
  Chinese Jet Pilot, did you grow up in the Chicago area? I know that an incident of that sort happened at my HS, but it was during the 1986-87 school year. The walkman had been rigged to play music when the locker opened for someone’s birthday….
- Anonymous
  
  “Relax, you’ll live longer.”
  
  Someone please make a national TV ad campaign based on that slogan.
- Anonymous
  
  > If it had happened today, his academic career might have ended.
  
  I doubt that, because a walkman is a walkman is a walkman. But any contraption that looks like it’s homemade and remotely looks like the bombs in the movies would have done that. Of course there’s lots of movies with the most awesome bombs in it, so a lot of things can be mistaken for a bomb these days. Even if it consists mostly of LEDs and a battery.
- Anonymous
  
  @ Chinese Jet Pilot
  
  “If it had happened today, his academic career might have ended.”
  
  No, if it happened today, he would have been made fun of mercilessly for being too poor to get an iPod. I have a feeling tape decks aren’t in much use in high school these days.
- ikoino
  
  In our high school, circa 1976, the prank of choice was ammonium triiodide. I suspect that contact explosives, albeit harmless, would be frowned upon, these days.
- Anonymous
  
  Alright honestly now, I gotta ask when are you getting Murilee in for his stint as guest blogger on BB? Probably the only reason I read Jalopnik anymore is to click over there on the weekends to read his posts; because they have that certain something which cannot be named but appeals to me greatly.
  
  http://jalopnik.com/265913/turbo-ii-junkyard-boogaloo-+-part-1-features Also this thing is pretty rad too.
- Anonymous
  
  At my suburban Connecticut high school (District 17), in the ’80, we had pipe-bombings on a semi-regular basis. It was always agenda-less local kids blowing up stairwells. No panic, no evacuation, no school closure. In subsequent years, pre-9/11, there were acts arson, some destroying whole bus fleets, and still no panic, no evacuation, no school closure. I am sure that things would not be the same now.
  
  We have already lost the War on Terror, and we appear to be attempting to lose even harder.
- sludig
  
  In my high school, it was a distortion pedal.
- Anonymous
  
  Boarding school, post-grad semester (well, almost a semester, was supposed to be a year)…
  
  Borrowed a 4 1/2-oz. block of sodium from the chem lab, kept it in vegetable oil. Shaved pieces (LITTLE pieces) of it off for a long time, put ‘em in the sink with water, in water glasses, etc. etc..
  
  Finally lobbed the remainder (which was almost all of it) into the quadrangle pond at one o’clock in the morning on an exam weekend. Furious hissing, and a huge boom later (followed by a number of secondary explosions which I reckon was bits of sodium going off in other corners of the pond) all of the ducks left and didn’t return for three weeks. And out of the mist in the middle of the pond arose a seriously large smoke cloud (mushroom-like, in my mind’s eye).
  
  Fortunately, someone squealed on me and it was “added to my file”…wasn’t too long after that when I was asked to leave. Boy, is that any way to treat a budding scientist?
- AlexG55
  
  I know someone who, in the early-to-mid 70s (IIRC), had a high-school teacher who was fairly universally regarded as a terrible teacher. This guy and some of his classmates decided to complain to the principal about the quality of the teaching- and to record one of the lessons on tape as evidence. One day, before the lesson began, they hid a tape recorder in the teacher’s desk. Unfortunately, midway through the lesson, the tape ran out. The teacher heard the clicking noise, opened his desk, saw the tape recorder, screamed “IT’S A BOMB!”, threw it out the window and ran. He was never seen at that school again…
- JoshP
  
  It’s funny how a couple of times a semester, every semester, back in the mid nineties my quasi-urban, right next to a large military base, public high school would have ‘bomb’ threats and we’d have to spend an afternoon in the gym. All of us.
  Funny how those same dogs and officials that looked for ‘bombs’ pretty much were the same used for drug patrols. Of course, no one would grossly violate our privacy by completely fabricating a ‘bomb’ threat and then searching our entire lockers, cars, p.e. clothes, etc.
  Wow, it sure was a coincidence when the guys that liked to get high pretty much disappeared after those ‘bomb’ threats.
  I mean, no one would ever completely disregard someone’s privacy without a second thought because they mistakenly believed they had a moral prerogative…?
- hooeezit
  
  @#5 (ill lich): Bravo, Bravo! I commend you on your eloquence.
- VagabondAstronomer
  
  Didn’t mention this in the original post, but since we’re on the subject.
  This didn’t happen at school, but trust me, it was grand. We had a little model rocket club, and one of our fields of choice was literally right across from an airport; their choice, mind you, as the field was outside of the approaches to the runways. Chances were pretty slim that a plane would be hit at all. On a cool 1st March, 1980, we had our first annual competition in this field, just the club. Nearby, my local CYO was also holding a kite flying day, again out of the path of any airplane. North Florida has little rain late winter through early spring, and so it was that we had gone for about a month with nary a drop. As we trudged along, the brownish yellow grass crunched beneath our feet. First launch was a rocket glider (for those in the know, a Renger Skyslash). Roared off the pad, got to maybe 100 meters, kicked out the engine, began a lazy, spiraling glide. The whole club ran out into the tall grass to await the red glider’s return.
  The whole club.
  Nobody stayed by the launch pad.
  As I was walking back, I noticed a black disk growing in the short grass around the pad and moving northwest. The sparks from the launch had set the grass on fire, and in just a few seconds, the circle of fire had expanded out to five or so meters. I called to the rest of the club, and in desperation we tried in vain to keep the flames from reaching the waist deep dry field grass (some kids at an old boarding house didn’t heed our cries for help and instead sauntered on up to watch).
  The flames hit the tall grass and shot up into the clear, blue March sky.
  Forty five minutes, two fire companies, a National Guard UH-1D and emergency diverted air traffic later, the fire was out. As president of the rocket club, I walked up to the fire chief and was prepared to meet my doom. Instead, he tilts back his hat, looks around and then back at me and says “we’ve been trying to have controlled fires in this field for weeks, but you accidentally burn the whole thing down. All we did was let it burn and controlled it.”
  I was prepared to have to change my pants, but got off with a pat on the back. Somehow I doubt I’d ever be that lucky again.
- Jonam
  
  In our high-school (Australia, mid-to-late 70′s), it was not the students but our science teachers that would:
  a) show explosive chemical reactions in the playground,
  b) electrocute (mildly) the class with a Tesla coil,
  c) do the mandatory sodium in water explosions and
  d) show how to make and detonate gunpowder.
  
  They were happy to answer any questions students had and would often try out any suggested experiments. Safety was emphasised but there were no bomb squads called out, no reprimands from the principal and most importantly, we learnt a lot and had fun doing it.
  
  I despair for today’s children who will probably miss out on doing these sort of things because of a mentality of “terror of terrorists” that has pervaded the (western) world. So many things that I didn’t hesitate doing freely in my younger days are now heavily controlled or prohibited.
- Roy Trumbull
  
  When I was a sophomore in HS I brought in a pitcher plant from our garden for the biology glass to see. It digests flies that enter its blossom. It hadn’t bloomed.
  The next week it did bloom and when I came to class I found all the students in the hallway including the ones from the adjacent classroom. I leave it to you to imagine the odor the plant emitted to attract flies.
- mgfarrelly
  
  “The Terrorists” can’t win.
  
  Al-Queda doesn’t have the numbers, the money, the support staff, even the ideology (which is a mish-mash of anti-western nonsense, conspiracy theories and bastardized Islamic principles) is just a mess. There’s never going to be an “Islamic conquest” of America. Again, the numbers just aren’t there. This isn’t WWII or the Cold War, the enemy here are fanatics and lonely goofballs trying to set their underpants ablaze in the name of something they probably can’t even define.
  
  And yet the terrorists have won.
  
  Because we are terrified. We allow our bags to be searched, our shoes removed, our body’s scanned and probed. We deal with “extra screening” as if it is perfectly all right to be randomly selected to be further scanned and probed. All of this serving no purpose save the illusion of safety. The giant lines and knots at checkpoints make more alluring targets than any plane in the sky, let us hope the bastards never figure that one out.
  
  Because of a couple of deeply unwell children in Colorado committing a horrible act of violence we allow our children to be wanded. We demand “zero tolerance” which really means we demand rigidity and lack of common sense. A child with a chicken finger is as mucha a danger as a mand with a AK-47. Of course.
  
  We drive the pedos to live under bridges (because nothing bad could happen when someone is marginalized by society, bitter, angry and living under an overpass) and scream for more prisons to house the ever growing criminal class. When anything can be a crime, in the eyes of “safety” we’re gonna need more bars and more guards.
  
  The terrorists win when we are terrorized.
  
  (sorry for the rant, but this just galls me)
- Mark Dow
  
  There should be a Nerd Merit Badge for this:
  
  http://www.nerdmeritbadges.com/
  
  I get one. Northgate HS, Walnut Creek CA, spring 1977. Did hard time — three hours in the can, and 40 hours public service. It still is a badge of honor.
- enkiv2
  
  At some point, very much post-9/11 (maybe 2005?) I went into my high school wearing my homebrewed (second or third generation) wearable computer. Most people thought I was wearing a bomb vest. Luckily, the principal and vice principal were friendly with me, and the teachers could vouch that what I had was indeed a computer.
  
  Oddly enough, nobody much cared about the robot I brought in that same year, with mostly the same component parts but lots more room for potential hidden explosives (and the ability to drive itself into some hidden corner and trigger actions on a timer).
  
  ‘Security theatre’ is a good moniker.
- Church
  
  @Mark Dow “There should be a Nerd Merit Badge for this:”
  
  Damn straight. The “Busted for Science” badge.
- cstatman
  
  @#21
  
  yes yes yes well said.
  
  they have won. we have BUH-zillions of dollars to spend so a rent-a-cop can feel up my mother-in-law boarding an airplane, but we have nothing for science and education
  
  we have lost.
- Anonymous
  
  5th grade: I had escalated from chasing girls on the playground with earthworms, bugs, etc. One evening, I asked my Mom to help me concoct the ultimate; “nitroglycerin.” We got a clear film canister, filled it with a nondescript white powder (flour), and carefully labeled it as “Nitro-glycerin”. The next day I brought it to school and took it out at recess so as to “terrorize” girls on the playground. A playground attendant saw me, and thought she knew what I was up to. “A kid at another school had pretend cocaine, and was suspended. That’s not what this is, so carry on.”
  
  9th grade: I had just learned about the internet and things like the Jolly Roger Cookbook, Anarchist’s Cookbook, etc. I found one, “The Terrorist Handbook” and printed out every page and put them together with black clips. I carried this in my backpack for 2 years, breaking it out in class with friends when we needed a chuckle, or dream about how to make a quick zip gun or the real-deal aforementioned nitroglycerin. Teachers would see it, and tell me to put it away. Never was it confiscated, never did it set off any alarms, false or otherwise.
  
  I loathe to imagine what would have happened in either scenario today. *shudder*
- FAC33
  
  Two friends of friends of mine rigged up a remote control smoke bomb their senior year in high school. They were going to drive it into the cafeteria for instant mayhem. Instead the bomb squad got called. They got a stern talking-to and a short suspension, with no further consequences, although they got ribbed for years. Definitely would have qualified for the “Busted for Science” badge.
- Hamish Grant
  
  Went I was in high school in Toronto back in 1985-1989, things were much different than they are today, to be sure…
  
  Case in point my nerd buddies and I were amused at the time with air-soft guns, which shoot little plastic pellets with not that much force – enough to sting a little but not much else. Anyway so two or three of us had gone in on a H&K MP-5 semiautomatic rifle, which looks like a compact AK-47, all-black, mostly metal construction, it looked exactly like the real thing. So the three of us were ‘sharing it’, one would have it for one day, another the next, whatever… so it was one guy’s turn and he had it in his gym bag during computer science class. The teacher was an even bigger nerd than we were, and long story short he caught sight of the gun in buddy’s bag and confiscated it for the rest of the class. That’s it – just for the rest of the class, and told my friend to stick it in his locker for the rest of the day and not bring it back. But not before he’d taken a few potshots at us (he knew which three were the likely co-conspirators) for his own amusement. Imagine the scene today, a teacher confiscating a concealed weapon and then firing it at his students…
  
  Anonymous
  
  Sorry, that’s a pet hate of mine. Just because it’s a gun, it doesn’t mean it looks like an AK.
  
  It’s like saying an F16 looks like a shiny spitfire.
- novaX
  
  When I was in High School maybe a year before the Columbine shooting I had gone to the bathroom, and while away my English teacher went through my bag, saw some black candles I had bought earlier that day while skipping, and called the principal. She thought that it was dynamite, so when I got back to class I was escorted by the police officer on attendance at the school to the principals office. The police officer went through my bag found only candles and books, then sent me back to class.
- jeligula
  
  This happened at my school in 1983. I was overheard joking about it before the fact and was grilled by the local law enforcement and the FBI. I had nothing to do with it and barely avoided expulsion and criminal charges. That would have happened, except the guy who actually did it confessed. Anybody who says there were no consequences prior to a certain date is telling a fish story.
- Anonymous
  
  Sometime in the late 1950′s an airman doing flight line maintenance to a fighter jet at Selfridge Air Force Base north of Detroit (by Mount Clemens, MI) crossed some wires and managed, to his horror, to fire two live rockets into the distance across the runway. One blew up the second story of a house on Crocker and the second didn’t seem like it went off. The next day my cousin Dwight was sitting in L’Anse Creuse school and an Army convoy pulled up and soldiers marched into the school. Seems a couple of his classmates had found the unexploded rocket and, after tossing it around on the playground, had stashed it in a locker. My dad, who was an Air Force sergeant and recruiter in Mount Clemens at the time, drove me by to see the damage to the house on Crocker. He said the lady of the house was slightly injured, she had fortunately been downstairs at the time of the blast.
- Anonymous
  
  Everybody keeps talking about how “the terrorists have won”, and linking this to Al-Qaeda; but Al-Qaeda isn’t what people are worried about, it’s Dylan and Klebold.
  
  -Darren MacLennan
- rebdav
  
  There is a book called The Fourth Turning it is about the cyclical nature of history and how there are 4 distinct flavors of generations, at least in North America. Maybe gen x-ers are just much more open to this cool science stuff, although I am afraid this vice-principal might be an x-er.
- kullervo
  
  I won the science fair in ninth grade by building a still. These days they would have called the bomb squad, the fire department, the cops, and child protective services. Instead, I went on to win the county.
- hallpass
  
  In 1991 or 1992, I had an advanced placement computer science class with few older guys who fancied themselves hackers. The class shared a teacher with an intro to BASIC class in the lab next door and our school didn’t pony up to license C++, so it wound up as a largely unsupervised study hall in a computer lab.
  
  One or two of the students in this class worked in stage lighting and sound outside the school and so had access to theatrical pyrotechnics. We hatched an idea to place a charge inside the bell of sousaphone and detonate it during the marching band’s halftime show.
  
  The flashpower was contained in a 35mm flim canister. It was detonated with an electric match detonated by a 9v battery inside a blue box with a momentary type switch. The wires were disguised and secured to the sousaphone with a decorative gaffer tape application in the school colors.
  
  The sousaphonist triggered the boom at the end of the last song in the halftime show. It was louder than anyone involved expected. The crowd of several hundred in the stands ducked in unison. The band director, who was narrating from the press box, swore over the PA. The best part was the smoke ring that roiled out from the bell of the sousaphone and into the stands.
  
  My involvement in the scheme was minor, so I escaped the fallout, but I the sousaphone player was suspended for a week or two.
  
  The thing that strikes me is that this episode was never treated as anything more than a disciplinary issue. The police weren’t involved.
- Day Vexx
  
  Practically every boy in my 4th grade classes used to rig up little AA-powered toy truck motors to the underside of their desk/locker/teacher’s desk, resulting in a terrible buzzing from the gears against the metal desk body.

When getting the bombsquad called to school was a badge of honor

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