This Doesn't Happen Everyday (from Robert)

So, while I was busy at work today typing away on my computer and taking phone calls, someone else was busy right below me – ROBBING A BANK!

I knew it wasn’t a good sign when I started seeing numerous flashing lights out of the corner of my eye and, turning my head, saw twenty people pressed up against the windows of the building across the street staring straight at my building. Shortly after seeing police cordon off the sidewalk below my office with their yellow tape, we heard from building management that the bank directly below our space, three floors down, had been robbed. Yet as clever as the thief might have thought he was walking out of a bank with a huge bag of dough that wasn’t his, he was outwitted when that dough bag exploded, squirting red tracking ink all over him and his unearned prize. Perhaps realizing he’d been foiled, he stashed the bag under a folding sandwich-board sign for the shoe store next door and took off (see man staring at red ink on sidewalk in photo above).

Staring straight down, I watched as investigators in latex gloves removed the fallen shoe store sign to uncover wads of hundred dollar bills that they started stuffing into brown paper evidence bags. For a while, bills were scattered on the sidewalk around a puddle of red ink. We’re told the bag was rigged and apparently kept in the bank in the event of a robbery.

In the midst of the ‘excitement,’ I started to wonder how something so classically huge could have happened right outside my window without me even noticing. A bag holding thousands of dollars exploded in a man's hands right below me, and I had no idea it was happening. Thinking back, I think I may have heard the shoe store sign get pushed down over the cash, and I also heard people yelling right after it happened, but I didn’t think anything of either noise. I work on the fourth floor of a downtown office building, so I hear things fall and people yelling daily. The only police sirens I don’t subconsciously block out are the motorcades coming from the White House, and I only hear those anymore because they involve about 20 sirens instead of just one or two. The only difference between the noises today versus any other day is that today’s were the result of a bank robbery as opposed to a delivery man dropping a fragile package or a homeless person yelling at the air in front of him.

After more thought, however, I was redeemed from feeling completely clueless in my office bubble. I remembered seeing a few minutes before the robbery took place a strange car stopping down the street, shifting into reverse, and backing back down the street, through an intersection, and coming to a stop about 50 feet from where the money was found. People drive bonkers in DC, but I’ve never seen anyone go in reverse through an intersection. The car then shifted back and forth a few times as if getting into position. Did I see the getaway car?? Who knows. But I went downstairs and told an investigator what I’d seen just in case. He seemed pretty interested and jotted everything down in a little flip-pad. A news report I just read says the robber was last seen going in the opposite direction of the car I saw, so it may have just been a weird car, but at least I noticed SOMETHING today. Now back to my typing and phone calls.