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A company is not an army.

You don’t train your employees on active shooter drills by having a guy barge in shooting blanks.

Source: was in the army.




True story, but I’m not making a point here, or trying to disagree with you. Just something that happened to me once:

I was leaving a hotel near the airport in Delhi, and as were waiting outside for an Uber the manager of the hotel told us not to be alarmed if we saw some guys with guns running towards the hotel. Told us the police were running a terrorism scenario to see how the local hotels would react, and whether they would follow the plan for such an event. The guns would be unloaded, but everything else would seem realistic. The manager and the outside security knew about it (because they had to let the “terrorists” into the hotel) but no other staff or guests had been warned. We were only told because we were outside and might see them coming and he didn’t want us to give the game away.

Fortunately our Uber arrived before the “terrorists”. It’s possible the manager was just fucking with us, and none of it happened, but it didn’t seem like it and if he was that’s a pretty messed-up thing to do, too. It occurred to us that if they were actual terrorists he might be in cahoots and making sure they got into the building.

He also told us how in a real event he told his outside security guys to run away, they couldn’t stop terrorists anyway, and there was no point getting themselves killed.


Thank you for your service. Hopefully you can appreciate the tradeoff between mental/emotional discomfort and an actual problem that was the point of my analogy.


They don't. That's why they disagreed with you.

The tradeoff here is an idiotic one.

You don't set your own building on fire in order to test fire safety.

You don't destroy company morale to test phishing security.

It's really that simple.


If we're arguing analogies, OK. Does your company ever have fire drills? What if the first sound of the alarm freaks someone out? What if people find it annoying/idiotic/morale reducing to walk down the fire stairs?

At some point you just say "look, we need to make sure our people are trained, if people think fire drills are stupid or upsetting, we have to take that hit because the alternative is worse."


Your analogy is disconnected from reality. Fire drills (aside from the surprise kind which can be pretty bad) are gone into with full knowledge.

You ain't comparing the same thing. Temporary discomfort is not the same as this boneheaded move that wrecked their morale.


Fire drills without the knowledge of the participants sounds like a very dangerous stunt to play, that it surely only exists on television.




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