This event occured quite a while back. Back all the way to my senior year of high school. As a part time job I was working at a performing arts theatre doing things like selling conscessions, counting tickets, and changing the marquee. At this time I had already been working there a couple years and was pretty much running on autopilot. One night after a show while doing inventory my manager told me that she would be out of town for the next show. Since I was fairly confident in myself I told her that I could manage the whole front lobby that evening. I had no idea what I was getting into. For the next show the trouble began even before the first curtain went up. I was informed by an usher that one of the guests were telling them about some kind of fire outside the lobby. When I went to investigate I found a garbage can on the sidewalk with smoke billowing out the top. Apparently someone finished a cigarette and thought it would be fine to just throw the rest into a trash can. After dousing the would be fire with a couple buckets of water I thought for sure the rest of the night would go smoothly. I was wrong. During the first intermission a guest approched me to tell me that the women's bathroom in the basement was taking on water. Taking on water? I didn't even realize we were at sea. I hiked up my pants and began sloshing my way through a couple inches of water to toilet that kept gurglin water from the bowl. At that point the damage was down and the only thing I could do was to prevent it from getting any higher so I turned off the water, put up an out of order sign and have maintenance deal with it as soon as possible. I held my breath all through the second intermission hoping I could make it through it without incedent. The house lights flashed indicating the intermission was over and telling me that I could begin closing up and that I had made it through the evening in one piece. Then, it happened, a theatre guest came up to me with the strangest news yet. "Um...I think there is a bomb in the ladies room in the front lobby." A BOMB! She told me she heard this strange beeping sound coming from the next stall over but was too afraid to investigate. Without even thinking I went immediately to the bathroom in question. A plot to blow up the theatre? Not on my watch. After checking that the bathroom was unoccupied I walked in and sure enough there was the beeping sound the guest was complaining about. The echo of the beeping in the hard tiled bathroom made it impossible to determine the exact source by sound alone. I slowly opened the stall doors one by one not wanting to trigger a massive explosion. By the time I came to the last stall door I was drenched with sweat. Here it was the moment of truth....nothing, all the stalls were empty. After a 5 minute visual search I had found my IED near the garbage can. It turns out my bomb was not a dangerous IED but a harmless EAD, Empty Aromatic Device. The device that periodically sprays the room with the scent of a thousand fields of flowers had run out and when this occurs it begins to produce a very bomb like beeping sound. What an eventful night, fires, floods and a near terrorist attack. That just goes to show you what trouble you can get into when you try to help someone out. Next time you think to yourself, "What's the worst that could happen" don't rule out the possibility that the worst may indeed actually happen.
