Colour me blonde, but aren't there some things that just shouldn't mix?

Blue and green (unless together in a washing machine). Meat-eaters at a tofu convention (clearly, a wrong turn). And retail workers and bomb searches.

It seems officials with a retail store in St. Jean-sur-Richelieu, east of Montreal, didn't get the memo. The store's approximately 40 employees were asked to help look for a bomb, the result of a threat received in early July. All customers, however, were immediately evacuated.

I would have thought the retail worker/bomb search pairing would have been firmly ensconced on the big list of DON'Ts - but apparently not. It seems it is, in fact, completely acceptable to have workers provide services that rightfully should only be done by those with appropriate training.

Don't get me wrong. Employees know the ins and outs of a workplace, all its nooks and crannies, and that information can prove invaluable to investigators. But it's difficult to believe that experience and expertise could not have been provided, in a timely manner, from the sidelines. That is where safety - not just the promise of it - could be assured.

I hadn't realized that service as a human bomb detector is now a requisite qualification for retail work. Methinks this should not be the case.

True, there were no injuries. There couldn't have been, as no bomb was ever found. Chalk the incident up to a prank.

But pranks are no longer late-night garden raids, and games of knick-knock. These days, pranks may be cause for real concern. And that demands real care.

Consider that earlier this year, Quebec's provincial police force was ordered to stop using private security guards during checks of marijuana grow operations. The police argued they needed extra helping hands. But a provincial appeal body ruled the presence of the guards, because they did not have the same training as officers, in fact, posed an unnecessary safety risk.

The bomb threat incident, of course, has raised the ire of organized labour which says workers have the right to refuse unsafe work without the fear of reprisal.

A store spokesperson reported that any concerns about taking part in the search would have earned the employee in question an immediate pass.

The goal was simply to cooperate with police, not to put workers in harm's way - or make them feel that they had been. Had anything been discovered, police would have immediately taken over.

There doesn't seem to be any one way to deal with bomb threats in retail settings. Maybe staff lend a hand; maybe they are immediately evacuated - you know, along with the customers.

It may be time for both police and retailers to get together to develop a unified approach for dealing with such threats - one that takes into account the legal and moral obligations to workers.

What if someone had been injured? Surely, they would have received compensation. And then there's the workers who say they feel traumatized by the incident. What if they develop conditions down the road?

Will that extra bit of assistance provided by untrained workers, who shouldn't have been there in the first place, be worth it?

A miss can sometimes be frightfully close to a direct hit. Never the twain should meet.

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