SWAT team cuffs masked Dell flack for 'deadly' tablet promo
Call 911! He's selling the Dell Streak!
Dell's Round Rock, Texas headquarters was stormed by a police SWAT team on Monday after multiple 911 calls reported that a masked gunman was ordering employees into a building lobby.
Round Rock's finest discovered employee Bryan Chester dressed in a biker outfit, wearing a skull mask, and carrying what callers identified as "two metallic objects."
But this wasn't really a hostage situation. Chester and his supervisor Daniel Rawson were engaged in a ill-advised promo stunt, reportedly to introduce staffers to a new Dell Streak tablet.
"Through a series of misinterpretation, miscommunication, this sent a lot of others into a controlled panic," police spokesman Eric Poteet told Austin news station KXAN.
Chester and Rawson compounded their idiocy, KXAN reported, by refusing to comply with police orders to cease and desist. "If it wasn't serious enough," Poteet said, "that elevated it to extreme risk scenario."
Considering the gun-happy culture of Texas, the two marketeers were lucky that none of the employees they terrorized were packing heat.
Both pranksters were arrested, and according to KXAN, Both face misdemeanor charges for "Interfering with Public Duties and Deadly Conduct."
A Dell spokesman called the use of a skull-mask to drive employees into the building lobby for a product intro "an unfortunate choice," and thanked the Round Rock police for responding quickly before anyone was hurt.
One commenter to the KXAN story aptly summarized the event by quoting tough-guy actor John Wayne's well-know dictum: "Life's hard. It's even harder when you're stupid." ®
COMMENTS
A "controlled panic".
Interesting euphemism.
Of course, we only hear the police's part of the story, and who have a vested interest in both bigging up the issue to show they were Doing Their Jobs and in "calming the populace", which is probably where that contradiction in terms euphemism came from. It may well be the two guys were being jackasses, but I'm not prepared to blindly take the police's word at face value, who might've overreacted instead of defused the situation like they're supposed to do first. Not assuming either way, just pointing out it could just as easily be the other way too.
But nobody was killed.
So how the hell was it deadly conduct?
But thats beside the point, I was commenting on how the charge has a ridiculously over the top name for a misdemeanour.
Which is typical American overkill
Icon, irony appreciation fail.
Controlled panic
That isn't a euphemism. I think you'll find it's oxymoronic. And the police officer in this case clearly just moronic if he thinks there's such a thing as "controlled panic".
Baron
The part that caught my eye was:
A Dell spokesman called the use of a skull-mask to drive employees into the building lobby for a product intro "an unfortunate choice," and thanked the Round Rock police for responding quickly before anyone was hurt.
What was the risk of anyone being hurt (before the police arrived)?
