Copycat bomb threats

I went from cleaning/painting ships in the north of Amsterdam to international coordinator for computer parts at Honeywell International, a computer time-sharing organization.

How I got the job is a bit strange.
It was 1970. Since I had arrived in the Netherlands nine months earlier, I had been doing manual work. I wanted to do something else, so I sent a letter to all the international companies at Schiphol Airport offering my services.
I was invited for an interview by the manager of Honeywell International. He was a con artist (I found that out later) who maintained that he had been a British army paratrooper and had fought against the insurgency in Cyprus.
He asked me trick paratrooper questions like, how do you parachute into sea? I answered his questions correctly and he gave me the job.

This is before the age of the PC. Companies did not then have their own computers. They used to buy time on a computer with time-sharing organizations like Honeywell.
Computer time-sharing was a relatively new market with teething troubles.

Honeywell had a computer network throughout western Europe. The national subsidiaries had their own small warehouses for computer parts.
There was a rudimentary automatized system that supplied these warehouses from the much bigger central warehouse in the entrepot building at Schiphol, where I worked. We received our parts from Texas.

More often than not, something went wrong with the supply chain to the national subsidiaries. As a result, there were always some computers that were not functioning properly. Then there was the nightmare scenario of computer "down".
That is when I came in. I had to find replacements for the malfunctioning parts anywhere and get them to the national branches as soon as possible.

The above is a long introduction for a short story.
This is the time of left-wing terrorist organizations. There was a spate of bomb threats to buildings in and around Amsterdam. The media, even then, went overboard with their coverage of the threats, giving them exaggerated publicity.
This lead to a lot of copycat bomb threats.

One of my colleagues, Dieter, was a German gay man who had moved to the Netherlands because life was more difficult for openly gay people in Germany.
He was friendly and extremely intelligent with a rather morbid sense of humour.
We did not do the same work but we had our desks, together with two other people, in the same room. 

Dieter and a colleague were listening to the umpteenth discussion about the bomb threats on the radio. They were laughing and joking about them.
For no apparent reason Dieter picked up the phone, dialed the office and in a muffled voice said there was a bomb in the building.
Then he put down the phone and started chuckling.
I did not say anything. I just sat there shocked, with wide open eyes.
A few minutes later, we heard the sirens of the police cars and ambulances.

The manager came in and said that there had been a bomb threat and we would have to leave the building.
Dieter now seemed to realize what he had done. He looked terrified.
He went into the manager's office and told him it was all a practical joke. The police and ambulances were called off.

He was fired immediately.