Bomb Threat

There was a bomb threat at Burroughs High School yesterday afternoon. My daughter was sent home with around 1700 of her classmates around 11 AM yesterday.

Boy things sure have changed since I was in high school. We only had one bomb threat during the three years I went to high school. They evacuated the school to a practice football field across the street where we all hung out while the building was searched. They did not release us until the school day ended three hours later. BHS was at least smart enough to send these kids home.

Which brings us to a communication problem that we discovered in our home. My daughter has a cell phone. Stuff like this was exactly why we let her have one. However she is apparently not willing to talk on it. She will make calls, but won't talk. She apparently learned this from her mother. But she is not the only one with a problem, She won't talk on the phone and I won't answer one.

I was home for lunch yesterday. I have a habit of not answering the phone while I am home for lunch. I don't have a lot of time and I usually use it to just de-stress for a few minutes. In the past when I answered the phone I would spend my entire lunch hour telling telemarketers that I'm not interested in buying thier crap. So I let the machine pick up the phone while I'm home during lunch.

Yesterday while trying to enjoy a quiet few minutes the phone just rang off the wall. I had 5 calls in about 20 minutes. All five of them hung up as soon as the machine picked up. So I assumed that they were not important calls. As it turns out, two of them were my daughter and three were my wife who was in a panic because she had learned from someone at work that the school was being shut down and she wasn't able to get a hold of our daughter and didn't know where she was.

My daughter in the mean time had called the house, my office, my dear wife's office, our house again and finally gave up and called her grandmother to come pick her up.

I have since explained that if she had simply started talking when the machine picked up her first call I would have picked up the phone, we could have talked and I would have come picked her up.

In the end, everything turned out well thanks to Grandma. My dear wife spent the afternoon in a panic and having a meltdown worrying about her baby. I got a pretty good laugh out of the whole thing. Not that I think that bomb threats are funny. I just found our families inability to communicate in spite of two cell phones, and three POTS lines between our home and work locations rather amusing.

I am worried about my dear wife though. Since she missed one important call yesterday while she was in the bathroom I'm afraid she might not go to the bathroom at all today. Either that, or she will end up injuring someone when they trip over the wire in the hallway when she drags her phone in there with her.