The law week Heist (or - Tornadoes, blow darts, and pickpockets)

We have this thing at law school called law week.
All week long we have distinguished speakers come in and give a short lecture on their specialized topic and take questions. It is pretty cool because even if the speaker sucks, they still feed you lunch.

One of our speakers commented early on that she didn’t think that she had enough material to cover the entire half hour allotted.
Yea, whatever.
45 minutes AFTER her original half hour was up, we were still sitting there.
Politicians… Who knew?

Anyway, the rain was beating down and the entire area was under tornado watches / warnings. (Who really cares about the difference anymore except for old people and the guy who drones on endlessly on the local TV news. You have to listen to him because you can’t see his face due to the fact that the entire screen is covered with pictures of the “super doplar ten million jigawatt mega fantastic” local radar, storm warnings, severe weather warnings, tornado alerts, and logos.)

“This just in - Breaking coverage: It is raining.”

No kidding? I was wondering what all that wet stuff was blowing up against the window.

As the speech droned on…
School was canceled and closed for the rest of the day due to the weather.
I think the speaker thought that this meant that she had us captive until someone actually died from boredom.
The dean came to the side door and was making all kinds of hand signals to those of us that could see her.
Now, for some reason I don’t think the dean is all that fluent in sign language.
What she was trying to tell us was that school was closed, there was a tornado, and we needed to finish up, get out, and get somewhere safe.
But…
Through her extraordinary use of sign language (something akin to what the first settlers must have used with the Indians). I was able to decipher that she was thinking of washing a pot or perhaps making soup. Or perhaps she had been bitten by a dangerous insect. I couldn’t really tell. She could have used smoke signals and it would have been clearer.
What we finally figured out was that she was telling us to shut the speaker up even if we had to choke her out.
I think somebody in the back of the room was busy fashioning a blow dart knock out weapon out of ink pens and Tylenol.
The speaker got to the end of sentence and took a breath.
We all started clapping.

“Oh, my time must be up.” She said.
No kidding lady. I was thinking of sending a bill to your office for the time I wasted here and perhaps a tort claim for unlawful imprisonment. (Actually she wasn’t all that bad – just long winded).

So the whole big crowd grabs up their books and hurries out into the parking lot to get into their cars. They do this because a giant tornado is coming and it is of course safer to be on the road in a blinding rain than to sit quietly for another half hour till the thing blows over.

Here is the sucky part.
While we were trapped at the meeting upstairs we had left our books in the room downstairs because we were supposed to have a class right afterwards.
Two of my friends happened to leave their bags in the room. While we were in the meeting, some thief stole their wallets.
I’m not sure if the speaker was in on it or not. It might have been some kind of bait and switch delay tactic they had been practicing or something.