Posted Tuesday, April 18, 2006 by Gene

Just for the record
I had nothing to do with the Natalie Holloway disappearance. I just wanted to get that out of the way.

24 madness
I worked in a bank branch for many years. At night, when we had to close the main vault we had this timing mechanism inside that required us to figure out when we wanted the door opened again. Should anyone attempt to open the vault prior to that time the lock would not budge. I remember this because there were occasions in which the person doing the math for the vault did it incorrectly-- either they just miscounted or they neglected to take into account things like daylight saving time-- and we had to wait until later to get into the vault.

So on 24 last week, in order to get into a safe deposit box in a downtown bank branch at 11:30 at night, Jack Bauer, drives to the bank manager's home, kidnaps him, and makes him open up the branch. I would like all of you to know that this will not work. Number one, bank managers are like McDonald's counter help: they change every six months or so. Number two, it takes more than one person to open ANYthing in a bank. Number three, if someone turned off a motion alarm in a bank at 11:30 at night, do you think maybe the alarm company would notice this and go "hunh... that can't be right"? Well, they would. Number four, see my comment above. If Jack's lucky, the vault was set to open an hour before the branch. Keep in mind that I'm talking about technology that was old when I worked in the bank a decade ago. There's no way that fancy-ass electronic vault they showed on TV is somehow missing such a patently logical safety precaution.

Now, if I were writing this show it wouldn't be a run-of-the-mill bank. It'd be a pricey, private clients bank, where twenty-four hour access to the safe deposit boxes is a feature. How hard would that have been, I ask you?

Addendum
Kiefer Sutherland signed a large contract to keep him on board as Jack Bauer for the next few seasons, as well as for a movie. Question: you have a show whose calling card is it's real-time format, with 24 episodes each making up one hour of a single day. What do you call the movie version of this show? I'm voting for "2".