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Zeta's Stories: Work SWAT Team
Dec. 31st, 2023 12:28 amContent Warning: Police response, unintentional self-swatting. (No serious injuries or deaths, just a /hysterical/ amount of poor decisions and a few traumatized kids that legitimately could, and probably /should/, have died.)
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Personal disclaimer: This story appears to involve sensitive information, but actually does not, as you can find everything but the story itself on the company's website.
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So this story comes to me from a co-worker a number of years ago, and took place a year before I started at this job.
At the time, my coworker was (and later I would be) working at $defense_contractor, a defense contractor in the city of Tucson. Said contractor handles a lot of intelligence work, which is extremely highly classified! Now, if you've ever watched a movie involving a contractor out in the desert (Terminator, other random sci-fi or action movies), you've probably noticed that these places all usually have /significant/ private security contingents. There is a reason why, and that reason is that if you have a security incident at your facility, you (legally and obviously practically) need to have a serious response very very quickly, scaling with the type of incident and type of information you have at the facility. Keep in mind that intelligence information is basically protected by the highest classification that US government has, again for obvious reasons (losing a war, troops and sources being killed etc).
So, with that background, our story begins.
It is approximately 10:30PM on a Saturday night, and my coworker is coming down the stairs of $defense_contractor's office building, about to head home after some significant overtime. He pops his head out into the lobby, and sees a bunch of people running around with assault rifles with ski masks on! Freaking out completely, he slams the door, runs upstairs, and puts the entire facility into lock-down, calling 911 and everyone under the sun to come help with whatever is about to happen!
Cue one third of the police force of Tucson showing up outside the building within 15 minutes!
What my co-worker does not know at this point is that those rifles aren't actually real, nor is anyone trying to kill anyone or break in, despite the cameras showing them trying to tamper with locks. What's actually happening is that $defense_contractor only rents 4 of the 6 floors in the office building (having built out their areas to the appropriate specifications - SCIF), and there are multiple other businesses in the building, including an insurance company. Said company has a guy working for it who has a kid in highschool, and he and his friends are trying to make an action movie for class, including some filming in a commercial space. Dad has the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas, and tells his kids that they can absolutely do it in the lobby late on Saturday night when no one is around, which brings us back to current events.
Eventually, the SWAT team throws flash-bangs in, storms the lobby, and tackles everyone to the ground, scaring the everliving shit out of all of these people. Lasting trauma ensues for absolutely no good reason, especially since these fine individuals had both /removed the orange tips from their airsoft rifles/ and /were actively hunched over a lock looking like they were trying to break in for the purposes of the movie/. In what is frankly a miracle, no one was shot or otherwise injured in a serious way, though I'm sure quite a few people learned what tile floors tasted like without meaning to.
Everything immediately de-escalates, but everyone is /absolutely/ going to jail, as taking the orange tips off your fake rifles is a crime in most states, including Arizona. (Can't imagine why that would be important. Perhaps it would help prevent a situation like this?) Unfortunately, though, the incident lasts basically the entire day, since they have to clear the building room by room and everyone has to be debriefed and sign NDAs for any classified material they may have been exposed to. Utter, fucking, disaster.
Shockingly, no one was killed, but even if this guy contacted building management, and they had contacted $defense_contractor, and $defense_contractor had sent an email out, and even /if/ they had had orange tips on their rifles, this was a /shockingly bad idea/. The sheer amount of stupidity that somehow resulted in no one dying actually makes me quite unreasonably angry, as I have no idea how one makes decisions this stupid. Even if it had been a normal commercial space, this would have been a /terrible/ idea, but with $defense_contractor there, this was just horrific beyond description.
Fuck, even telling that story gets my heart rate up. XD
----------------------------------------
Personal disclaimer: This story appears to involve sensitive information, but actually does not, as you can find everything but the story itself on the company's website.
----------------------------------------
So this story comes to me from a co-worker a number of years ago, and took place a year before I started at this job.
At the time, my coworker was (and later I would be) working at $defense_contractor, a defense contractor in the city of Tucson. Said contractor handles a lot of intelligence work, which is extremely highly classified! Now, if you've ever watched a movie involving a contractor out in the desert (Terminator, other random sci-fi or action movies), you've probably noticed that these places all usually have /significant/ private security contingents. There is a reason why, and that reason is that if you have a security incident at your facility, you (legally and obviously practically) need to have a serious response very very quickly, scaling with the type of incident and type of information you have at the facility. Keep in mind that intelligence information is basically protected by the highest classification that US government has, again for obvious reasons (losing a war, troops and sources being killed etc).
So, with that background, our story begins.
It is approximately 10:30PM on a Saturday night, and my coworker is coming down the stairs of $defense_contractor's office building, about to head home after some significant overtime. He pops his head out into the lobby, and sees a bunch of people running around with assault rifles with ski masks on! Freaking out completely, he slams the door, runs upstairs, and puts the entire facility into lock-down, calling 911 and everyone under the sun to come help with whatever is about to happen!
Cue one third of the police force of Tucson showing up outside the building within 15 minutes!
What my co-worker does not know at this point is that those rifles aren't actually real, nor is anyone trying to kill anyone or break in, despite the cameras showing them trying to tamper with locks. What's actually happening is that $defense_contractor only rents 4 of the 6 floors in the office building (having built out their areas to the appropriate specifications - SCIF), and there are multiple other businesses in the building, including an insurance company. Said company has a guy working for it who has a kid in highschool, and he and his friends are trying to make an action movie for class, including some filming in a commercial space. Dad has the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas, and tells his kids that they can absolutely do it in the lobby late on Saturday night when no one is around, which brings us back to current events.
Eventually, the SWAT team throws flash-bangs in, storms the lobby, and tackles everyone to the ground, scaring the everliving shit out of all of these people. Lasting trauma ensues for absolutely no good reason, especially since these fine individuals had both /removed the orange tips from their airsoft rifles/ and /were actively hunched over a lock looking like they were trying to break in for the purposes of the movie/. In what is frankly a miracle, no one was shot or otherwise injured in a serious way, though I'm sure quite a few people learned what tile floors tasted like without meaning to.
Everything immediately de-escalates, but everyone is /absolutely/ going to jail, as taking the orange tips off your fake rifles is a crime in most states, including Arizona. (Can't imagine why that would be important. Perhaps it would help prevent a situation like this?) Unfortunately, though, the incident lasts basically the entire day, since they have to clear the building room by room and everyone has to be debriefed and sign NDAs for any classified material they may have been exposed to. Utter, fucking, disaster.
Shockingly, no one was killed, but even if this guy contacted building management, and they had contacted $defense_contractor, and $defense_contractor had sent an email out, and even /if/ they had had orange tips on their rifles, this was a /shockingly bad idea/. The sheer amount of stupidity that somehow resulted in no one dying actually makes me quite unreasonably angry, as I have no idea how one makes decisions this stupid. Even if it had been a normal commercial space, this would have been a /terrible/ idea, but with $defense_contractor there, this was just horrific beyond description.
Fuck, even telling that story gets my heart rate up. XD
