Ever head into the office to find your chair at someone else’s desk? Or a new plant in the break room? What about a live explosive next to where you keep the server racks? That’s what Reddit user WhySoSadCZ appears to have found and photographed after attempting to perform some routine maintenance in a seemingly innocuous office building.
According to the Czech Republic-based Redditor, who says they went to an office building to perform some work on an air conditioner unit, the device was discovered in a server room that had been locked for two months after the employee responsible for it left, taking the keys. WhySoSadCZ says they broke into the room and found the device.
On Monday morning, WhySoSadCZ posted an image of the device on the Reddit community r/whatisthisthing, joking, “Farewell present from a former employee maybe?” Other users soon identified the object as a 9M14 Malyutka anti-tank guided missile originally developed by the Soviet Union. As a general rule with all unexploded ordnances, no one should touch them under any circumstances, and they should be reported to authorities for immediate disposal or detonation (which would suck if you left your lunch in the company break room).
WhySoSadCZ subsequently posted a series of rolling updates, detailing their call to police, the building’s evacuation, and the confiscation of bystanders’ phones. “Some black vans with no registration plates on the scene, few military cars,” wrote the Redditor. “It looks like a complete military lockdown.” According to WhySoSadCZ, the ordnance was identified as an active anti-tank missile, and was transported to a military base for detonation by a military bomb squad.
Of course, as with any incident online, the whole story could be made up, but a reverse image search on WhySoSadCZ’s turned up no results. Gizmodo has reached out to the both the Czech Republic Armed Forces and the Police Presidium of the Czech Republic for further information on the alleged incident.