Suspicious Parcel!

Something out of the ordinary happened this morning at work. You may know that I work in a mailroom. Well, after having emptied the mailbag onto the desk, I noticed a large white envelope that seemed to have scribbles all over it, and three stamps placed haphazardly in the top right-hand corner. There are two big colour posters on the mailroom wall that show an example of a suspicious parcel. This envelope I was looking at matched at least two points on the checklist, for sure. The envelope looked like it had been addressed by a madman. Almost every word was misspelled and there were squiggles and arrows and other strange marks all over the place. The back of the envelope was similar. The return address was almost impossible to read, appearing to have been scribbled by somebody in the middle of a seizure. That was also surrounded by odd markings. Secondly, there were too many postage stamps. Excessive postage is another indicator of a suspicious parcel. OK, so another indicator is a bulky or rigid envelope, and guess what? That's right, this one was bulky. It felt like there were various strange objects inside. All this added up to one thing: this envelope must not be opened, but reported to supervisor! Supervisor arrived and I showed her. She agreed that it was suspicious and that there was no way in the world that she would open it, so the next step was to notify our Security Manager. He came in and inspected the envelope and confirmed our suspicions that this was a definite candidate for serious and careful attention. He raced off to summon the police.

Later in the morning I found out the result of the police visit. They decided it was very suspicious and x-rayed it three times! Yep, three times. The first time they thought they saw a wire. The Security Manager told me that at that moment, he felt a shiver, a shadow of impending doom. However, two subsequent x-rays must have negated the wire theory, and when the envelope was finally opened, it was found to be a request to be considered for a volunteer position, but also contained mysterious objects like feathers and doll parts.

But that's not all! This afternoon I received an email requesting my attendance at a debriefing on the incident next Monday morning between 1100 and 1130 hours. I've never been to a debriefing before, so I can't wait!