As we have all learned every single time one of these stories comes up, teachers and school officials always assume the worst. Pop Tarts and fingers are now guns. So, of course, when 14 year old Ahmed Mohamed brought in a homemade digital clock, what did they do?

Why, the school called the police, claiming it was a bomb.

Mohamed told the News that he built the clock in about 20 minutes Sunday evening using a pencil case, a circuit board, and a power supply wired to a digital display. Mohamed said he showed it to his engineering teacher Monday morning.

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,'” Mohamed told the paper. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.'”

Later in the day, the News reported, Mohamed’s English teacher complained when the clock beeped in the middle of a lesson. When Mohamed showed her the device after class, he claims she told him, “It looks like a bomb.”

“It doesn’t look like a bomb to me,” Mohamed says he told her. The teacher kept the device, and the school’s principal and a police officer pulled Mohamed out of class and brought him to a room where five other officers questioned him and searched his belongings.

One has to ask at this point, if the engineering teacher is telling him “don’t show any other teachers,” did he have an inkling that an English teacher might look at this clock, see wires, and assume “bomb”? And if so, why didn’t the teacher offer to keep it until the end of the day to avoid all of this hassle???