Over the past several weeks, one cannot watch CNN or even check their e-mail without hearing something about the recent Anthrax envelopes appearing in corporate mailrooms in the Eastern United States.
A couple of weeks ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released safe handling instructions for suspicious mail articles. This statement quickly disseminated throughout the RPI campus, appearing in everyone’s mailbox and posted about every 2 meters in the mailrooms.
Now just yesterday, November 2nd, the RPI mailroom announced that it will be closed indefinitely while they investigate ways to improve ventilation and educate mailroom employees in safe handling techniques. The announcement came in response to a statement from the Centers for Disease Control.
This is definitely a major overreaction. First of all, the attacks thus far have taken place at political and media headquarters, not at university campuses. Furthermore, the kind of disruption that is caused my mailroom closure is exactly the kind of attack on infrastructure that a biological (or any other) terrorist attack is supposed to evoke.
We’ll have to see how long the mailroom in actuality remains closed. However for a place that processes 200+ packages and thousands of letters per day, this will definitely cause a major backup and disruption in general throughout the campus.
The Onion said it best with their little editorial about the American public’s response to recent anthrax incidents.