Good Morning - it's a Bomb Drill

A bomb drill – not the typical start to my day.  I hope they are not preparing us for our Middle Eastern ports. They say that they are now required to perform a bomb drill annually.  Ahh, the times they are a changin’.  I found this drill interesting.  They have these boxes labeled “Suspicious Package”. Part of the crew runs around placing theses boxes in various areas of the ship.  Then at the signal, most of the rest of the crew members, and willing passengers, are turned loose on some kind of bizarre Easter Egg type hunt where they to try to locate the “bomb boxes”.  In addition to the boxes being clearly labeled – they are not allowed to hide them. All boxes must be “hidden in plain sight”. This certainly facilitates the search.  Now I’m just thinking, if I were a terrorist I am pretty sure I would opt not to label my bomb. I am kind of thinking I would also try to conceal it.  I suppose I understand labeling the “bomb boxes” as some boxes are placed in passenger’s staterooms.  No telling what forms of embarrassment a search by the crew might uncover if they rummaged around in boxes in some of these passenger’s rooms. Passengers might get a little huffy about the crew poking around in their Cuban cigar boxes or the gifts they packed to send back to Aunt Lucy and Uncle George.  I know at least one passenger that picked up a little “wacky tobaccy” in Aruba.  What I don’t get is being required to put the boxes in plain sight. Watching this unfold I thought -  for this drill to be effective in a real life situation, they need some pretty cooperative perspective bombers. For this to work,  we need to post a lot of notices, in various languages, stating that any explosive devices left on our ship must be clearly labeled as such and left in plain sight. I have visions of terrorist tiptoeing back through the dark, bombs tucked under their arms, quietly reboarding their little boat saying, ”drat, Omar should have told us we needed labels”.