Some things bother me...

And this is one of those things.

Do you ever see something, or read about something that for no apparent reason sticks in your mind and won'g go away? Well this is one of those things.

It all started many years ago, when I first saw the movie WarGames, with Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy and the guy from 9 to 5.

At one point, all the main protagonists are holed up in the top secret military bunker place, with Maurice out of Northern Exposure. As the tension mounts, and nobody's sure whether there really is a full scale nuclear bombardment headed into America, or whether it's just a figment of a big computer's imagination, they raise their military status thing from DefCon 3 to DefCon 2. Very Tense. Only one step away from all out global war. When the status changes, the bunker locks itself down. I'm assuming automatically. One of the big things that happens is that a huge (and I'm talking HUGE) big metal door (presumably proofed against every Bad Thing known to man) closes and locks. Hardcore. Nothing's geting in or out of that place until the door opens again.

Now, I'm assuming that they keep this door locked for the duration of the war, as well as until any fallout's cleared. In short, they could be there for some time.

Since this giant, heavy, computer-controlled very locked dor is the only way in or out of the bunker, I'm sure everyone who works there knows exactly how hard it's going to be to get out. They know that if they hear the Big Door close, it's time to call the wife and tell her that they might be a few years late for dinner (and I'm guessing let her know that if it all goes tits up, they loved her, and there were so many things they wanted to tell her, but there just wasn't enough time).

Now, as the door's closing, one guy runs in to catch it before it's locked altogether. He's quite a young guy, in a uniform, carrying a sheaf of papers. The thing that's beenbugging me for the past 11 years or so is:

WHAT WAS SO IMPORTANT THAT IT COULDN'T BE FAXED OR PHONED IN IN THOSE PAPERS?

That's it. I just wanna know what was so important that, in the event of a potential Buck Rogers-style nuclear holocaust, he had to run to catch the door before it closed for an indeterminate amount of time, sealing him off from his family and miscellaneous extra loved ones for the rest of their lives.

It's one of those insomnia inducing questions that rears its ugly head when I'm just about to nod off for the night and keeps me up until 3am when my body finally gives up pondering it.

My bet is that he's some sort of accountant. 'I don't care that there's nobody on the planet left to pay. You still have to sign off these invoices!' That sort of thing. I hope that in the event of a real war, his mother's last thoughts were 'Well at least Simon's been saved by doing his duty for his country.'

Either that, or it was some top-notch pr0n that he wanted to save from vaporization.

What do you reckon he needed to dive into the bunker for?