Sylvester scare

Here's the wonderful story I heard at lunch today (names changed to protect my ass):

Some years ago, Alice and some coworkers enjoyed teasing another employee, Peter, who worked in a different building on the HFC campus. It amused them, for some unrevealed reason, to call him "Sylvester." One day they boxed up a Sylvester-the-Cat doll, addressed the box to Peter, and left it to be distributed with the incoming mail.

Unfortunately, several people in Peter's building had recently had some training in recognizing and responding to bombs.

According to the training, this box was "a suspicious package," partly because it had no return address. They evacuated the building. They called an Army bomb disposal unit, which drove in from someplace in Pennsylvania.

When Alice and her cohorts, at work in their building, discovered what was happening and heard the "suspicious package" described, they confessed. But it was too late. The protocol had been initiated. The bomb disposal unit had to unpack Sylvester-the-Cat and discover the truth for themselves.

The story was offered as a parable on the usefulness of training.
.