Gallery of the Uncommon

Panic at the campus

When someone thinks what is like to work at FEUP’s Campus, he/she always thinks about the quiet students wandering around from a building to another. Some of them are laying down on the green grass to recharge their batteries with the first spring sunrays. Others just calmly check their mobile phones; besides the birds singing, at most, you can hear a song or two of Praxe and even the insults seem lovely. Beautiful.

In other words, we as members of INESC TEC that work in this academic environment are lucky to coexist in this bucolic and countryside serenity that reigns in FEUP’s Campus where peace is never broken.

Well, our Zen state of mind was disturbed a few days ago.

We know what happened: an aspiring engineer found a suspicious package in an Electrotechnical bathroom.

The idiot starts running and shouting to call the police, the firefighters, the National Medical Emergency (INEM), the Bomb squad and the Security Information Service (SIS). And suddenly, FEUP gets flooded with all this people alongside the Media (who naturally tried to cover what was going on) in a great uproar, triggering panic in the community. The authorities immediately determined the emergency evacuation, and well - a suspicious package in a bathroom should always be treated carefully.

Is it a terrorist attack? Is it a bomb? Are they explosives? Is it white powder (the lethal one, because the other one would just mean fun)? The outcome: excitement, adrenaline, fear and creative gossip.

After three hours of distress and a lot of courage put in by the professionals, the mystery was solved: the terrible suspicious package was after all a foolish boulder, an ordinary paving stone.

Not excluding suggestions of intestinal problems, the explanation is simple: a Civil Engineering student found an escape in the Electrotechnical bathroom, maybe even seeing it as a political asylum, and just left a gift.

This seems much more effective to cause social alarm than the student of Electrotechnical who forgot an electron in the Civil Engineering urinals. Life is full of these imbalances and injustices.