The Crappiest Way to Scare People?

It was Monday, February 12, 2019 — only a couple of days before Valentine’s Day — at around noon. A man walked into a Home Depot in the Wichita, Kansas area. He was about to make their day a memorable one, and not in a good way.

At about 12:15 PM, according to the Wichita Eagle, the security guard at the store called 911. An employee came up to the security guard to report that a customer had made a bomb threat; a transcript of the relevant part of the call, via local CBS affiliate KWCH, is below.

Bombs are serious business, so the police immediately sent someone to the store. But when they arrived, the store was very much still standing. And to make matters even stranger, the customer who made the alleged bomb threat was long gone, without incident. He hadn’t even walked out with any stolen goods. But the police were able to confirm that an employee had, in fact, heard the customer make a threat; per the Eagle, “when police got there, an employee said he was ‘standing at the urinal’  when the man said he was going to blow the store up.

Without any damage beyond panic and without a culprit, the story may have ended there. But the would-be criminal had made a mistake. He was a regular at this particular Home Depot — and one of the other employees noticed him. That customer gave the police the customer’s name, and the police began investigating. 

The investigation didn’t take very long.

The police interviewed another customer who happened to be in a bathroom stall when the bomb threat was made, and that customer wasn’t all that worried. As he told the Eagle, that customer “heard another man announce something along the lines of, ‘You all need to get out of here because I’m fixin to blow it up.'” And when he heard the “threat,” he didn’t run for his life — he laughed. Per the police report, the man in the stall realized that there wasn’t going to be a literal bomb going off; rather, the accused customer “was in a serious need to defecate, and that he was attempting to provide a polite warning to the other patrons of the bathroom.” It turns out that you can’t spell “bomb” without “BM.”

Now seeing the threat as the literal bathroom humor it was intended to be, the police decided to simply call the deuce-dropping customer, just to be sure. He told them, per the police report, “that he had no intention of causing such alarm, and that the comment he said … was meant to be funny.” After doing his shopping and doing his business, the man left the store without a second thought and had no idea that his polite warning (albeit in impolite terms, perhaps) had caused such an incident. 

According to Fox 4 Kansas City, “Home Depot [ . . .] declined to press any charges,” which is good. It would be really bad for business to ask the police to prosecute a regular customer for literally making a big stink.

Bonus fact: Blue whales often have orange poops. Discovery Magazine explains why (and yes, there’s a picture of the orange poop, and no, it’s not all that gross of a picture): whales eat a lot of krill, and the whale feces gets its color from “the krill on which the whales feed.”

From the Archives: The Poop Collector: The story is about a guy who collects poop, but I want to use this opportunity to share something else that I find weird. The word “poopy” means what it means, but if you take the last letter off, you get “poop,” which means the same thing as “poopy.” And if you take the last letter off “poop,” you get “poo,” which also means the same thing as “poop” and “poopy.” I hope there’s no larger meaning in this.