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A favorite Social Engineering tactic of Parker Lewis Ferris Bueller and MacGyver type characters is to get what you need done (or just confuse the hell out of people) by shouting that it's an emergency and enlisting them in your Stone Soup or Fence Painting project. In some series, all you need to do is look like you're in charge and know what you're doing.
Commonly used to criticize modern culture as overly sheeplike, and/or show the main character as cool, intelligent, and rebellious. The idea is, if you push the Authority Button on the drones, they'll do whatever you tell them to, no matter how absurd.
See also Refuge In Audacity.
Examples:
Fiction
- The trope's name comes from the Illuminatus! trilogy, where Simon Moon used it to illustrate how most people will follow even nonsensical orders if given in a tone of authority; he stops several cars in the middle of traffic, shouting, "Bavarian Fire Drill! Everyone out! Stay in line!", getting the perplexed drivers to follow him in marching in a circle around their cars before then getting back in as if nothing had happened. The name itself is a reference to the old prank of a "Chinese fire drill", where the passengers in a car stopped at a sign or light all get out at once and get back in different seats.
- Several characters in the Discworld novels have gotten their way simply by acting like they're in charge or that they belong where they're not supposed to be. Victor Tugelbend does it to get into a "clicks" studio in Moving Pictures, where the narration states "No-one with their sleeves rolled up who walks purposefully with a piece of paper held conspicuously in their hand is ever challenged." Moist von Lipwig is rather fond of this in Going Postal and Making Money. And Granny Weatherwax has passed for nobility in both Witches Abroad and Maskerade by simply dressing the part and being her usual bossy know-it-all self, since many folks on the Disc "confuse bad manners with good breeding". Nanny Ogg, on the other hand, gets through crowds by acting like a servant. Even Corporal "Nobby" Nobbs, who has to carry around papers proving his species, manages to pull this off with ease in Men at Arms.
- Less unrealistic than it seems, really. Everyone assumes that if you're trying to get into someplace you shouldn't be, the answer is to remain unseen. No one ever thinks to make it look like you belong there, which is why it seems so amazing that Discworld characters (the lot of whom came about by just sitting down and thinking for two seconds together) get away with it so often.
- Happens a lot in Doctor Who, partly because of narrative necessity, partly because the Doctor seems commanding and often knows what to do.
- Assisted in the revival seasons by a new sample of Applied Phlebotinum known as 'Psychic Paper', which can conveniently appear to be any form of credentials he thinks he needs... unless the viewer happens to be psychic enough to see through the illusion, like everyone working for Torchwood, or intelligent enough, like William Shakespeare.
- In the webcomic PvP
 , Brent, after discovering that working at an Apple store won't let him get a free iPhone, walks outside and tells everyone waiting in line on the opening day that they'll need to move a few feet back. After they do, he walks into the open space at the front of the line and quits his job so that he's first in line. This might have worked better if this plan hadn't required he then stand in front of several outraged customers until the store officially opened.
- Angel has, at least once, gotten on to crime scenes and pumped the cop on the scene for information by playing the bossy plainclothes detective, no badge needed.
- One MST3K skit has Pearl, Bobo and Observer putting on penguin costumes and using Bavarian Fire Drill tactics to try and trick Mike and the bots into dressing in a similar fashion. After laughing at Mike and the bots' pathetic attempts at costumes, Pearl, Bobo and Observer come to the sad realization that they themselves are even more pathetic thanks to the massive amount of effort they put into their lame joke.
- Comic book example: John Constantine of Hellblazer is fond of doing this from time to time.
- So do the guys on Hustle. Usually Ash.
- In an episode of Get Smart, Max managed to order soldiers about to execute him to turn around just before their boss (who was standing right behind them) orders them to fire. The reason ? They were Ruritanian soldiers, and Ruritanian soldiers are always more-or-less brainwashed into "obeying orders" without thinking.
- Rusty Ryan pulls this in the remake of Ocean's Eleven, rescuing another character from arrest by barging onto the scene and acting like a detective, taking charge of the arrest and getting rid of the officer by ordering him to go find someone who didn't exist.
- Apparently people don't get any smarter about this in the future: in an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, a group of Genius Ditzes managed to order their way onto the station to see Bashir simply because one was dressed as an admiral. When questioned, the "admiral" would simply act irritable and the cowed crewmember would back off.
- In the Tom Clancy novel "The Sum of All Fears", a group of German neo-Nazis/Arab sympathizers armed only with about ten stolen Russian colonel's uniforms manage to convince the entire Russian East Berlin garrison to launch an attack on their American counterparts. Though to be fair, disobedience in Soviet Russia was hardly the most healthy pastime.
- Miles Vorkosigan pulls these off with remarkable skill. In The Warrior's Apprentice, he parleys an old freighter, a bodyguard, a friend and a couple of losers into a mercenary fleet — with him as its Admiral, a persona/disguise he would use on occasion for over ten years — in a matter of weeks, mostly by force of personality. And he was seventeen at the time.
- The title character from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency cons his way onto the site of a murder investigation simply by acting confident and official, and orders the cops to do several strange and useless things in order to get them out of the way.
- In Alan Moore's Top Ten series, a character who legitimately is a high and feared official uses these tactics in pursuit of a decidedly unofficial personal agenda.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger pulled this in Jingle All the Way, showing a fake badge and ordering cops around during the raid on Santas' counterfeit toy factory.
- One of the running subplots on Arrested Development involved the character of Maeby who, despite being only 16 years old, gets a job as a movie producer simply by acting like she already was one.
- This is, in turn, based on an apocryphal story that Steven Spielberg got his first job at a movie studio by simply occupying an empty office and pretending he was supposed to be there.
- Pretty much any role ever played by Eddie Murphy; Axel Foley being the best known.
- In So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, Ford Prefect helps Arthur and Fenchurch board a flying saucer through a crowd of curious onlookers by wearing a lab coat and "randomly" choosing the couple to help him carry his "scientific equipment".
- Inverted in The Inspector General via Mistaken For Special Guest when the townspeople were expecting an authority figure in disguise.
- In a flashback on The West Wing, it is revealed that this is how Donna started working for the Bartlet campaign: she walked into the campaign office and started answering phones. Josh was pretty quick in catching her, but he liked her spunk and so kept her as his assistant.
- In tabletop roleplaying games any attempt by players to have their characters use a Bavarian Fire Drill to bluff their way into a place or out of trouble can go exactly two ways: Either the Game Master has a sense of humour, in which case a well-executed Bavarian Fire Drill will work and make for a memorable scene... or the gamemaster is a humourless railroading piece of skin who never ever allows the characters to bluff their way past anything even if they are masters of fast-talk, in which case all NPCs will suddenly become telepathic and the player characters will be forced into an annoying and pointless fight scene.
- In the Storm Hawks episode "A Little Trouble," Finn, disguised as a Cyclonian maintenance tech, evades capture when he accidentally steps on another tech's head by helping him with what he was working on. Then the squad is admonished by a passing supervisor for standing around when they should be working. No one ever notices until the Dark Ace recognizes their faces and points it out.
- In Diamonds Are Forever James Bond donned a lab coat, grabbed a clipboard and masqueraded as "Klaus Hergesheimer, G Section" (whom he had met earlier) to explore the secret installation where the Kill Sat was being created.
- In the old ''Mission Impossible" TV show, the IMF regularly pretended to be part of the organization they were infiltrating.
- In Office Space, Roger is able to take over Sydney's management position by acting like he's in management and looking the part.
- In the 1987 film The Secret Of My Success, twenty-something Brantley Foster — a whiz kid business school graduate given a charity mailroom job by his uncle when the company he was supposed to got to work for went under the day he started — pretends to be a new executive in his uncle's company simply by taking over an unoccupied office, requisitioning supplies, and getting a secretary from the company pool.
Real Life:
- Frank Abagnale, the notorious con artist on whom the book and film Catch Me If You Can are based, used this to pull off many of his cons. In one instance, he purchased a security guard's uniform and stood at a bank's overnight depository, telling patrons who pulled up to make their deposits that the depository was broken, but that he would be more than happy to secure their money.
- Germany was united in the 19th Century by the Prussians, whose aristocracy was arguably the most militaristic in Europe. Their obsession with things military spread across the country. At one point, a con artist dressed in the uniform of a German army captain entered a good-sized town claiming to be an "inspector," began ordering the mayor and officials around, and essentially ran the town for three days before anyone thought to check on his credentials. When emperor Wilhelm II learned about this, he even was proud: "Such things can only happen here!"
- A particularly heinous prank involving McDonald's, a master manipulator, and a telephone.
- In 1948, a Japanese male in uniform entered the Teikoku Imperial Bank and, using this trope, managed to get the entire bank staff to swallow poison. In unison. Detailed in the book Flowering of the Bamboo by William Triplett.
- The story is also mentioned in the James Bond novel You Only Live Twice.
- In Australia, the Chasers (best known for their APEC stunt) did many variations on this during the Chasers War On Everything, until they became too famous for anyone to be taken in by them.
- The Milgram experiment (granted, run back in the 70s) strongly suggests that yes, in fact, one can bluster and bluff people through faked authority. Scary implications, if you think about it.
- A recent version of the experiment in 2006 foudn results to be exactly the same.
- In the US military, whenever there are soldiers guarding the entrance to a secure facility, the commander of the gate guards is officially in command over anyone passing or trying to pass through the gate. The reason for doing this is to make sure that people can't bluff their way through a checkpoint just because they outrank the sergeant assigned to check I Ds.
- Joey Skaggs. Just...Joey Skaggs.
- For personal tales of chicanery from our tropers, see troper tales.
- Mexicans may remember this one very well, a person impersonating Sven-Goran Eriksson fooled each and every soccer manager, players and press he crossed and nobody actually knew until they were told. Here have a link:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2932440.html?menu=news.quirkies.sportingquirkies
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