Fear... the BOB!

[lederhosen]

For those who aren't keeping up with Australia's excitements, United Airlines flight 840, bound for Los Angeles, dumped 60 tons of fuel and returned to Sydney last night after the finding of "a note written on a sick bag warning of a bomb on board".

Well, it didn't actually say that. What it said was "BOB", which - in a feat of deduction reminiscent of Batman - was translated as 'Bomb On Board'.

Aside from being a common abbreviation for 'Robert', it turns out 'BOB' is also used by aircrew to mean 'Best On Board': "...it indicates from the perspective of people on board the aircraft, whether it's passengers or cabin crew, that someone sitting in a particular seat ... to put it quite bluntly, looks good."

This over-reaction is now being cast as evidence that we're on the ball, ready for everything the terrorists can throw at us. A cynic, OTOH, might feel that when three letters on a paper bag are sufficient to cause major disruption at Australia's biggest airport, then the terrorists have trained us very nicely indeed. The whole point of terrorism is to sow chaos and scare the hell out of people; when you can get them so paranoid they're jumping at shadows, why bother with suicide bombers at all? Mission accomplished, already.

Comments

[drzero.livejournal.com]

[inspector cluseau voice]

Oh mah god, it's a Bob

[/voice]

[ex-cerebrate131.livejournal.com]

Would a metacynic feel that the two are, in fact, functionally indistinguishable?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

IMHO it should be possible for rational, intelligent human beings to react appropriately to plausible threats, without considering a paper bag labelled 'BOB' to be a plausible threat. (If there's one thing every terrorist loves, it's lengthy explication - why on earth would they use an ambiguous acronym to issue a threat, rather than spelling things out?)

Ratcheting up threat-sensitivity to its maximum level is *not* a useful way to do business - while the genuine threats will very likely be flagged somewhere in there, they'll be drowned out by the false positives.

[ex-cerebrate131.livejournal.com]

rational, intelligent human beings

Well, that settles it. We're fucked.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

I'd have been terribly disappointed if you'd wasted such a blatant setup :-)