Do you really live in fear of unsecured 9V batteries?

Well good news, friend, because an unsecured 9V battery can't make a clock go off.

Wait, is that true? Nothing I've read said anything about it being a project.

Did you look?

Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.

He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for.

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”

No, no wait.

He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.

But wait, there's more:

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”

Ahmed felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name — one of the most common in the Muslim religion. But the police kept him busy with questions.

The bell rang at least twice, he said, while the officers searched his belongings and questioned his intentions. The principal threatened to expel him if he didn’t make a written statement, he said.

“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” Ahmed said.

“I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”

“He said, ‘It looks like a movie bomb to me.’”

"Wait, is that true?" No, I lied. I made it up. I stated something as fact so that maybe you'd accept it at face value and not notice that my entire point is based on falsehood.

Does the whole incident seem suspicious? Friend, I had a Pakistani friend who had to stop running at lunch because he got sick of longshoremen spitting on him. But you know what? If I were "suspicious" about something, I might read about it a little more instead of questioning the veracity of people who demonstrably know more than you.