This is not a drill…..

Typical Saturday in paradise, until…(knock, knock) we have the VRBO next door so our latest visitor came over in a panic and said he’d just received a dire ballistic missile alert by cell phone.  I’d heard the warning ding on my own phone but between the continuous tsunami alerts, the flood warning alerts and the small craft advisory alerts I didn’t bother to look at them anymore when they came in by cell phone.  So when he nervously told me about the warning I laughed and said, “I don’t think so…” but he showed me the text and the text said it was not a warning and it was not a drill!  Then I said, “We’ll let’s hope they hit Honolulu because the only way they’ll hit us out here on North Shore is if they miss their target!”  He was not at all reassured and there was an unspoken thought that past between us–that Kim Jung Un’s North Korean Military was more likely to miss their target than hit it according to all the news we hear….well, yikes, then!  My beach comber training still did not give such an off the wall text warning any credence but I realized I should show some sence of urgency because somehow I owed the guy in the VRBO some sort of concern over the idea that we only had a few minutes left to live and our wives and our kids were no doubt gonna die.  I brought him inside and we turned on the TV news.  A few uncomfortable minutes later they reported that Tulsie Gabbord confirmed it was all a mistake, but our poor Australian guest was clearly shaken to his flip-flops.  I slapped him on the back and said, “Welcome to the new USA!”

A couple of days later we found out Trump heard about the not a drill scenario while playing golf but he’d shrugged it off, not done a thing, and continued his Saturday game.