I went through the annually required orientation for one of our clients today. In addition to the normal safety stuff, they’ve added a new section on security, thanks to the new regulations promulgated by the government.

Now I’m in favor of security at these facilities. Believe me, if the terrorists were to make big boomy sounds come from a major refinery, you’d probably see gas prices triple. But some of the security is laughable. After all, the majority of the security guards are NOT candidates for Delta Force. They’re usually sitting in little glass booths making just a notch above minimum wage for a nice job with few physical or mental demands, and two guards for a facility with a quarter mile of deep water access on one side and a mile of fence on the other three, well, you get the picture… Fort Knox, it ain’t.

So back to my terrorist tendencies… I read this handout they give me. It talks about their security and enlists the help of all eyes in looking for suspicious persons, objects, or activities. They guy who gave me the handout has a sense of humor. He mentioned the suspicious object thing, and I asked him if bombs were supposed to be like those in the old cartoons: you know, the big black ball with the fuse sticking out of the top… He laughed.

My business requires that I bring with me various items of test equipment in a van. Assuming one actually comes out and LOOKS in my van,I have yet to show this to a guard have him (or her) question me about anything. I could be transporting a small nuclear device, for all they know…

Anyway, one of the activities they talked about was taking photographs of the facilities. So this photo taken from my recent trip, that makes me a terrorist suspect…

And although I haven’t done a lot of legwork to find details, one person working at a local boat lauch said there was “big” incident just recently near one of the facilities because somebody was “taking pictures”.

I guess I will need to be more careful…