Today, based on the fact that all my regular meetings are cancelled and my email box is full of reminders, I am working through all my annual online refresher training modules; all part of life in the public sector.

First on the docket is the annual anti-terrorism refresher training, which remains pretty much the same every year. It’s tedious, but I kind of look forward to it, because it’s rather amusing.

After a few introductory slides, it basically becomes a chronicle of an anonymous bureaucrat’s worst business trip ever.

His luggage gets tampered with. His plane gets hijacked. His hotel is invaded by terrorists and his rental car gets a smoke bomb planted under it. He gets followed by suspicious characters on the drive to the facility he’s visiting, Once he gets there, he gets involved with a security incident at the gate. Then he gets taken hostage (leading to a discussion of Stockholm Syndrome) by fake delivery people at his new hotel (he changed it after the last terrorist incident), and eventually rescued after the threat of a chemical weapons attack.

Then he gets home after the trip and on his first day back, he receives a mysterious package wrapped in brown paper with oily stains on it in his office mailbox, leading to a building evacuation. After this, he starts getting really paranoid; carefully tracking the movements of janitorial contractors in his building, and starts turning his home into a secure bunker that would make the most paranoid doomsday prepper say “hey, maybe you should tone it down a bit?”

You know, if I were this guy, I think I’d have quit and found a less stressful career after the second terrorist incident.