Discovery Channel Hostage Situation

Ohhh, man. It was QUITE a day at the office. I got a front seat to the whole Discovery Channel hostage situation this afternoon. You could begin to hear the sirens at around 1 PM. I was in the conference room, as part of a team interviewing a potential candidate. The interview had to be moved to a different room because of the commotion outside and people chatting about it inside.

After the interview, I went over to a co-worker's window, and there were cops and law enforcement vehicles everywhere...for BLOCKS. I've never seen anything like it. Not even when I worked in DC. Among all the policemen, I saw at least 3 snipers, 2 K9 dogs, and a few armored trucks. It even looked like some of the police had taken over the corner gyro guy's stand and borrowed his stools so they could sit down. At one point, one of the police was tossing another officer some water. One of them signaled "touchdown," which I thought was very immature for the situation at hand. Hello? Everyone's looking at you during this hostage situation. What are you doing, having fun at at time like this?! Anyway, things started to get serious when I saw armored officers go in (SWAT maybe?).

Nothing was really happening for about 3 hours. I was about to pack up and go home when I suddenly saw 2 people run out of the building and heard shots fired. The guy that I could see went down. I didn't see what happened to the other guy. My heart started to race. What if he's dead??? It felt like a movie or TV scene, but oh no...those were real guns and real bullets. About 5 minutes later, I saw the 2 men that ran out of the building escorted away in police vehicles and I heard that the bad guy had been shot. You could tell that the police presence around relaxed just a tiny bit. On the way home, I heard that the bad guy was killed and all the hostages were safe. Whew!

And to think that I was going to go out around 1 PM to find buy some super glue to see if I could repair the damaged card displays. I only stayed in the building because I was called in at the last minute to sit in on the interview. It would have been scary to be outside today!