These are tough times for unattended packages. Used to be you could sit around for weeks with not a care in the world, but these days you can't get 15 minutes alone before somebody comes along and wants to blow you up just because you make them nervous. All an unattended package really wants is to be left alone. Is that so much to ask?
But post-9/11, every unattended package is a potential co-conspirator, and that was the approach taken on Thursday when somebody found a briefcase sitting unattended at a talent agency on Rodeo Drive. To be fair, I guess it's not impossible that al Qaeda might try to blow up Beverly Hills, and so police were called and the area was evacuated. Not knowing what was inside, police had assumed it was a bomb and blew it up before it could blow up first. Sadly, it was not a bomb, but rather a laptop and (apparently) the completed draft of a movie script.
This is the part where someone reminds you to keep multiple backups and not all in the same place.
Police said the owner was "distraught" when he learned what had happened, and I imagine he had a sinking feeling when he saw a cloud of confetti looming over the intersection. Hopefully, he was distraught because he lost a good laptop, not because both of the only copies of his script were in that briefcase. But no word on that yet.
The world may never know what it just [lost]/[was spared from] (choose one). If there was any justice in the world, somebody would have blown up the script for "Armageddon," but no.
