Suspicious White Powdery Substance

Working for the Post Office at the time of 9/11 was an interesting experience. As part of my morning wake-up routine, when the alarm goes off, I shut it off, grab the remote, and turn on the TV. Flipping thru the channels and seeing nothing but crap and garbage on channel after channel usually annoys me enough to wake me up fully and get me out of bed. For whatever reason, on that particular morning I never once turned on the TV. Bizarre but true. I had no knowledge of anything amiss until I got to work and heard everyone else talking about it. I spent the next few days on the phone back to New York trying to locate everyone and make sure they were OK. I’m pretty sure had I turned on the TV that morning and seen what was going on I never would have gone to work.

The next few days were very unusual. Las Vegas has one of the busiest airports in the world. With no tall buildings outside of The Strip, it’s possible to see for miles in any direction. Consequently, any look to the east usually shows 4 or 5 planes making there way here with many potential bankruptcy filers. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, with all air traffic grounded, the skies were eerily empty and quiet. It was very odd and disturbing to be delivering routes with neither sight nor sound of a jet.

Fast forward a little bit, and we suddenly had the anthrax scare going around. Coming right on the heels of the World Trade Center attacks, everyone had instantly become uber-paranoid about everything, so now we were all going to die from anthrax poisoning. We had a safety talk in my office about anthrax one day, so I came in the following day wearing a t-shirt from the thrash metal band Anthrax along with a tape of one of their albums for my Walkman (yes, this was that long ago). I told one of my supervisors I had some Anthrax as I showed him the cassette…yes, I showed it to a supervisor who I knew would appreciate the joke…

Well, the paranoia hadn’t quite been quelled yet. The main processing plant for the Post Office in Southern Nevada is right next to McCarran Airport. A huge facility with dozens, probably hundreds, of employees on any given day. On this particular given day, the entire plant had to be evacuated and everyone had to mill about in the parking lot for a couple of hours twiddling their thumbs due to the discovery of a suspicious white powdery substance. This meant that no mail for the entire valley could be processed or sorted, no trucks could be loaded or unloaded, and that a giant metaphorical monkey wrench had been thrown into the works of the Post Office. A HazMat team was called in, and eventually came to the stunning conclusion…

…that the suspicious white powdery substance…

…that had been discovered…

…IN THE BREAK ROOM…

…was Coffee-Mate.

Ladies and gentleman, I’m sure all of you were given a brain. Please try using it.


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