A visit to the FBI

Look at this amazing bridge. It spans the New River Gorge in WV and is the largest arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere. I’ll be honest, I don’t know where the Western Hemisphere starts and stops but apparently I live in it.

I encountered this bridge on my most recent work travel to a super secure FBI facility located in…well I can’t tell you can I?

It was a little bit of a boondoggle in that my colleague, last minute, was unable to join me. We were planning on driving a rental car, so when I got the news I was going solo I had to press on in my minivan. This was fine, the van made it. The only point of concern was going through security in the van. There was a long line to get through the gates, so I had a lot of time to watch those go before me. You pull the car forward, open all the doors, take only your ID, go into the visitor center, get checked in, then come back to your car which presumably has passed the K9 sniff inspection for weapons, drugs, who knows.

The reason I was starting to sweat this process goes back to the whole rental car vs minivan thing. When you take a rental, you know it’s empty. The only things in it are those packed in your bag. When you take a minivan that totes around 3 feral children, you could be in for a major shock. I looked forward to the K9s and I looked backward at the dumpster fire that is my backseat. Who knew what was back there, certainly not me. You might think this is an exaggeration, but let me rewind two weeks.

Two weeks ago, my boy-child proudly announced he had cleaned out his dresser junk drawer because it was starting to smell a little weird. This wasn’t a huge surprise, he is known for putting lots of nature in it-rocks, sticks, leaves-I wasn’t shocked it smelled a little funky. The next day though, I noticed a bit of an odor from the bedroom end of the house; nothing terrible, but maybe we needed to open some windows and get the air circulating. The day after that, I asked Hubs to do a walk through of the rooms and let me know what he thought.

Hubs: It smells like something might have died around here.
Me: Right?! And not in the exaggeration way like, ‘bro, your room smells so awful, did something die in here?’ But in a real way, like, is there a dead creature in our house?
Hubs: We should probably have him go through his room when he gets home.
Me: He did say he cleaned it out recently.
*both laugh*
Me: It genuinely could be an animal. I can see him rescuing a mouse or bunny from the cats and putting it in his room to nurture back to health and then it dies and he can’t handle it so he leaves it somewhere. Oh my word what if there’s a dead creature in here somewhere?

I couldn’t bear it for the rest of the day, I had to investigate. I started in the closet, there was a lot of cardboard. Lots of home-made boxes that caused my heart to stutter because what if they were tiny mouse coffins!

They were not. The closet was clear; a concerning amount of dirty laundry, but no wildlife. I moved to the toy basket, also clear. I started following my nose. Maybe it was the sock drawer, sometimes sock drawers get nasty because you can only wash so much stink out of socks, they tend to hold onto it and when you get a whole drawer of stink it might smell like dead animal.

It was not the sock drawer. I was starting to panic at this point, what if it was in the vents? What if he made a secret drywall door and it was in the wall? I was on my knees in despair and that’s when my nose found it, in the garbage can. It wasn’t a creature.

It was an egg. Two eggs. Dyed, hard-boiled, partly peeled, eggs. FROM EASTER. Easter, which had been 5 weeks ago at the time of this occurrence. 5 weeks those eggs sat in his drawer, rotting, decomposing, turning all sorts of colors that were not the original dye-job.

I will never recover from that sight, nor smell. To his credit, he had cleaned them out of his junk drawer. He moved them all the way from the drawer, 3 feet down to the open garbage can in his room. I screamed. I screamed a lot of things but mostly, “he has lost the right to own anything, ever! Food will never be allowed beyond the kitchen doors again! Did he not realize this was food? What did he think would happen with these eggs? Was he TRYING TO HATCH THEM?”

This experience was still fresh in my mind while I sat in the FBI line. I mean there could be eggs back there, but worse there could be a pocket knife, a slingshot, really any item that came as part of his survival kit Christmas Advent calendar. One of the things that popped to my mind was a ridged wire used as a manual chainsaw. Let’s be real it’s basically a garrote.

What if they found that? Does that have a smell? Does it look worse if I start googling “what weapons can K9 smell?” That’s probably bad, right?

I realized I also had a bag of goodwill donations in the trunk. Oh my word, I was pretty sure I had a stuffed moosehead in the back of my car! What if there are more Easter eggs back there and it smells like death? What if I get sniffed out for death smells?

I watched that line creep forward, I was sweating more and more, and before I knew it my turn was up. I hit those automatic doors like the boss-mom I am and started a slow march towards the visitor center.

The check-in desk lady was very sweet but I knew it was all a front. “Did you bring any weapons with you?” she asked.

“I can very confidently say I did not bring any weapons.”

“An oddly specific answer, but thank you. Head on back to your car.”

If it’s still there, that is. I walked out and it was still there with all the doors open. Had they not even done my car yet? Was I going to have to watch this go down in real-time? Those German Shepherds looked pretty serious, but there was a black lab, maybe he would be nice to me.

As I approached, the K9 handler gave me a thumbs up and told me to have a good day. I couldn’t believe it. No Swiss Army knife, no garrote, no moose-head. Praise God. I tried to smile and wave like I totally expected the all clear but when I got in the car I couldn’t help cast a furtive glance around like I had gotten away with something.

The FBI event was very interesting and I really enjoyed learning more about what goes on behind the scenes. This specific location specializes in cybersecurity and criminal justice information. I heard seminars from chiefs of section such as firearm background check, the national tip line, and biometrics (iris scanning). It was interesting to hear how the areas of biggest development are, of course, AI and the cloud. But simultaneously the areas of greatest need are AI and the cloud. This is in the sense that AI has come a long way to help them; they use it to condense and aggregate information into human-interpretable chunks. But at the same time, AI is one of their greatest obstacles because criminals are using it to tamper with digital fingerprint records or iris-scanning software. Now the FBI needs software to identify AI-altered images while they’re also using AI to scan for criminals! It’s a real roundabout situation.

Of course we were only allowed to see a very superficial level of the facility, but I can confirm there are some real smarty-pants doing some really cool stuff.

Check out this badge, when I first received it on the day, it was solid white in the background. I got home, tossed it on my desk and the next morning it had this red ‘Expired’ across the background. Wild!