Never let it be said that the hard-working employees and worrywarts who travel the unprotected waters between Vancouver and Londsdale Quay on the SeaBus aren’t cautious.
On Tuesday, the SeaBus terminal in North Vancouver was evacuated for several nerve-wracking hours after a suspicious package was found under a seat on the MV Burrard Beaver. (Note how mature we’re being by not making a joke about “packages” and “beavers.”)
After the bomb squad sent in a robot and dog sniffer to investigate, authorities determined the suspicious package was in fact an “old style Walkman music player,” according to Metro Vancouver Transit Police spokeswoman Anne Drennan.
To the best of our knowledge, no one informed Drennan that “old style Walkman music player” is redundant and she should have just said “Walkman” or “Sony Walkman,” if you will, because what else would it be — a “Walkman Pizza Oven” or a “New Style Walkman Personal Massage Device”? Get it together, Drennan!
Of course, this is not the first time the bomb squad has been brought in to inspect a suspicious package lurking around the SeaBus. During the first few days of the 2010 Olympic Games, the North Vancouver SeaBus terminal was evacuated and 3,000 passengers left high and dry during rush hour due to a threatening “cylindrical tube” left leaning against a fence near the SeaBus drop-off area. Turns out it was a fishing rod.
We’re all for public safety and taking certain precautions against perceived threats, but it seems the guardians of Burrard Inlet have an issue with old or outdated technology. No one’s mistaking an iPhone6 for a bomb or suspicious of a FitBit lying on the ground. Which is why, as a service to the Metro Vancouver Transit Police, we’d like to issue a list of items you should never bring on a SeaBus in case its shear unfamiliarity to modern eyes makes it all the more suspicious or threatening.
• A spork
Sure, a fork shaped like a spoon is awesome and efficient for stuffing your pie hole with quarts of Chunky soup, but few people under the age of 43 know what a spork is and could perceive it as a potential weapon of mass destruction, and not just to your hypoglycemic index.
• Calculator watches
As we all know, only 1980s-era spies and fashionable residents of Mount Pleasant wear calculator watches, and we trust neither of them.
• Rubik’s Cube
We’ve always been suspicious of anyone who could complete this puzzle without peeling off the stickers and placing them in order. And if you’re still carrying a cube around, you’re either trying too hard or you’re up to no good.
• Easy-Bake Ovens
Letting little girls have their own mini-ovens in their bedrooms during the ’60s and ’70s was a great way to train future housewives (we kid… we kid… Happy International Women’s Day!), but Easy-Bake Ovens were also death traps. Death traps that could produce tiny, delicious, chocolate cakes in just under five hours of cooking under an unpredictable heating element.
• Bootsauce’s 1991 CD The Brown Album
Sure, you might find the amalgam of funk, ’90s grunge and clumsy sexual innuendo enchanting. But most people will consider songs such as “Let’s Eat Out,” “Sex Marine” and “Masterstroke” nothing short of musical terrorism.
• A print copy of the Vancouver Courier newspaper
A long, long time ago, before the Internet, before Craigslist, before the Iggy Azalea/Azealia Banks Twitter Wars of 2014-2015 in which far too many perished, there were things called newspapers, which you might have guessed, were made of paper on which words, often containing news, were printed. In other words: highly flammable, difficult to distinguish from an improvised explosive device and, like the Easy-Bake Oven, a death trap producing delicious items.
