Bavarian Fire Drill - Television Tropes & Idioms

John Constantine of Hellblazer is fond of doing this from time to time.
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.

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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.
- Also in Ocean's series; the Malloy twins frequently showed up as waiters, hotel security, casino patrons (it makes sense when you think about it); Dell as an electrician (also as a 911 operator); Tess, as Julia Roberts; Saul as a high roller in the first film, and a hotel reviewer in the third.
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.
Pretty much any role ever played by Eddie Murphy; Axel Foley being the best known.
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.
- Subverted and parodied with Kramer's alter ego, Dr. Von Nostrand.
  Seinfeld: He's not fooling anyone.
- In The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond attempts (and succeeds) to masquerade as the villain, Scaramanga, to a Thai entrepreneur — by actually pasting a third nipple on himself and hanging out proudly by the pool. He's gambling on the idea that that the entrepreneur and Scaramanga have never actually met in person, and that the entrepreneur would only know Scaramanga by his identifying physical oddity. The plan actually works but then Bond gets found out and used for practice by a Thai kung-fu school. Best. Bond flick. Ever.
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.
In Big Trouble In Little China, Jack and Wang bluff their way through the front office of the Wing Kong Exchange by pretending to be telephone repairmen, walking right past the guards without being stopped by talking about various telephone-related problems they'd supposedly been called in to fix.
A version of this is pulled in the movie Hackers, where the male lead talks a guard on night watch at the local tv station into handing over the number to the modem by claiming to work in accounting.
Mildly in Heat, where Mc Cauley merely needs to look and sound like he belongs in order not to be challenged by the hotel staff.
Done effectively in Midnight Run.
This is done by real police officers in Superbad. They turn on their siren just to get other drivers out of the way and so they can go through red lights. Unfortunately, this is actually fairly common in Real Life as well.
Near the beginning of the movie Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale pretends to be the substitute teacher for the French class at his new high school. It took a week for the faculty to catch on, during which time he already held a parent-teacher conference and was planning a field trip.
In Sneakers, Robert Redford claims (and demonstrates!) that all you need to get into any building in the world is a clipboard and a confident wave.
The Yes Men is a documentary of a group of activists who went around the world pulling off stunts like these, getting to hold speeches at all sorts of institutes, universities, and getting on news broadcasts. Selection of topics their Straw Man alter ego's supported are recyclic "human waste" to food in the third world, and reinstating slavery for the benefit of the clothing industry.

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The title character from Douglas Adams' 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. A detective who knew Dirk recognised he'd been present upon finding one cop disassembling a wastepaper basket and another defending a sofa immovably stuck halfway up the stairs with a handsaw.
- In the sequel, Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, Dirk employs another technique: Falling into step with a policeman entering the crime scene and offhandedly saying "It's okay, he's with me" to the officer stationed at the entrance.
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".
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.
- And that name in turn comes from a messed up fire drill by the Chinese Navy, where a miscommunication caused the bucket brigade to fill up buckets on one side of the ship and toss them out on the other side.
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.
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.
- So, so Clancy-esque fake. Unlike privates' and NCOs' uniforms, Soviet officers' uniforms were not standard issue and were their own responsibility to order. Custom-made from any tailor who knew and was able to follow the regulations concerning their design. Furthermore, except for rank insignia, colonels' uniforms in no way differed from the lowly junior lieutenants'. Thus, a uniform was ridiculously easy to come by, and all that was left was to create the rather simplistic rank insignia (just simple metal stars, really, in most generations of the uniform). Anyone truly wanting to wear an officer's uniform could acquire one with a day's effort and no theft involved.
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. Not only was he seventeen at the time, but the entire thing was a series of scrambling improvisations started by his impulsive effort to keep the pilot of said freighter (then docked at his mother's homeworld) from doing something stupid because it was about to be scrapped.
- And then keeps said mercenary fleet (mostly) fooled until he was thirty. Miles Vorkosigan: Galactic Champion of Making Shit Up.
Inverted in The Inspector General via Mistaken For Special Guest when the townspeople were expecting an authority figure in disguise.
This is the way Victor Cachat's Indy Ploys usually work. During that memorable snafu in Crown of Slaves he managed to enlist a Manticoran agent (two, actually), a group of neutral Solarian officers (with their squadron), a bunch of local nobles/dignitaries (who he was actually courting all that time, trying to pry them from Manticoran Alliance) and Royal Manticoran Navy Captain — all willingly and with their full support. They all knew who he was, but followed him anyway. His feat in Fanatic was no less impressive, but there he had some real authority, just subverted it to his needs.
Subverted in 1635: The Cannon Law. Ruy Sanchez tells several Spanish soldiers that he is a captain in the Spanish army, and gets valuable information from them. The Americans think he's pulled a Bavarian Fire Drill, until Sharon informs them that Ruy is a captain in the Spanish army. He left out the part where he's working for the Americans, though.
When he wasn't being a One Man Army, Mack Bolan (from The Executioner series by Don Pendleton) would often pull this stunt on both the local police and the Mafia, usually by posing as an outside Fed or elite hitman sent from New York to kill Bolan.
So, we are approaching the climax of the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Hot on the trail of the Big Bad, Holmes is in need of transportation. He employs a fairly illegal technique to do so ( i.e. hijacks a train at gunpoint), while a police sergeant is standing right behind him. The sergeant starts to protest, whereupon Holmes turns around, gives the man orders in his masterful way — and the sergeant runs off to execute them just on the strength of Holmes' delivery. It wasn't even a British policeman.
In his book, My Life In The Mafia, mobster-turned-informant Vincent Theresa tells of how he stole a load of blank driver's licenses. He walked into the factory, asked someone where they kept the blank licenses, picked up a box of them and walked out. Everyone he encountered just assumed he worked there.
A couple of Tom Holt's characters try this. Case in point: resurrected mercenary Kurt Lundqvist manages to hijack a plane by pretending to turn up to stop a hijacking, complete with using a library card to prove his identity.
In Dragon Lance, the kender have a saying: "Don't change color to match the walls. Act like you belong there and the walls will change color to match you!"

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This is standard operating procedure for both the good and bad guys on 24.
In the vein of faking out Nazis, Allo Allo did this a few times.
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 running subplot 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, in turn, is 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.
Done on Buffy The Vampire Slayer by Rupert Giles, ineptly impersonating an agent of Interpol to get information out of a cop. It worked, but only because the cop was under a spell.
- He wouldn't really have had any right to be involved even if he really was an Interpol agent.
Used to Michel's advantage in many episodes of Burn Notice.
- He also mentions that some marks are just too smart to fall for tricks like this, and therefore he has to use much more inventive methods. In one rather impressive example, he uses "reverse interrogation", setting himself up as a snitch to be interrogated by the bad guy, noting that while skilled interrogators are good at asking questions without revealing anything, bad interrogators will always tell you more than you tell them.
Happens a lot in Doctor Who, partly because of narrative necessity, partly because the Doctor seems commanding and often knows what to do.
- In one episode he gets out of being held at gunpoint by a room full of armed soldiers by using this — when a scream sounds from another room he yells, "Defense plan Delta! Come on!" and runs out of the room, and they all instinctively follow his orders, even though he's presented no identification at all.
- 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.
- Used in The War Games to get into a military prison.
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.
Heroes: Sylar (~~technically~~ a wanted Serial Killer) in the Volume 3 episode "One of Us, One of Them". He fakes being an FBI agent, and gets the cops to 1) pull back their barricades, giving him and Bennet room to work, and 2) get him some coffee.
Hogan's Heroes ran on this trope.
The guys on Hustle do so. Usually Ash.
- Likewise, spin-off The Real Hustle uses this, most notably to steal someone's car -- as he's getting into it.
- This is almost becoming a Discredited Trope in the UK: thanks to that show, and the fact that the real Police are also perfectly willing to engage in this sort of activity if they find it useful, most younger British people lack much of a sense of social compliance.
Ripped From The Headlines for the Law And Order Special Victims Unit episode "Authority."
- Which ended up being surreal, as the target of the investigation railed against people following orders without question...and then proceeded to order people around without being questioned by those he was ordering. He went from being against the sheep mentality to being the shepard.
Done all the time in Leverage, often by Hardison.
In the old Mission Impossible, the IMF regularly pretended to be part of the organization they were infiltrating.
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.
Shawn in Psych has a tendency to do this; partly because his 'psychic' abilities (read: keen observational skills and theatrical nature) tend to throw people off their guard and result in them buying anything he'll tell them, and partly because he's The Charmer who can twist almost anyone around his little finger.
- The few times it hasn't worked (it's not foolproof), Shawn has literally been struck dumb.
- One particularly audacious example had Shawn pretending to be a chief resident doctor doing rounds with interns in order to figure out what was wrong with a comatose patient. When he couldn't understand their medical terminology, he told them to dumb it down for the comatose patients, and they did.
Often used by Frank Parker in Seven Days, even when his status as an actual NSA agent could get him whatever he wants.
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.
- The "admiral" answered every question given to him with "That's a stupid question!" It worked perfectly.
Almost every episode of Supernatural involves the brothers posing as police, FBI, or even priests to gain access to evidence or question witnesses.
- Not a strict example, however, as they have fake ID for everything and are more than willing to show it to anyone who asks.
- Played straight in one episode "Hollywood Babylon", where Dean gets mistaken for a PA on a movie set, and goes with it. He orginally does it just so he has unlimited access to check for EMF, but finds himself surprising good at it, and enjoying it.
Very first episode of Titus.
Erin: You guys know you're not allowed in the building anymore, how'd you get past security?
Titus: You walk in with confidence, nobody bothers you.
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.

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In Wagner's Götterdämmerung, Hagen calls the Gibichung vassals to the wedding by bellowing about danger and woe. It ought to be mentioned here that Richard Wagner was a Bavarian (by residence, at least, though a Saxon by birth).

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In 7 Days a Skeptic Dr. Jonathen Somerset is actually a completely different person; the main character posed as him to get onto a spaceship.
In the Ace Attorney series, specifically in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice For All, you meet a man in a hospital who claims to be the hospital's director. The illusion falls apart very quickly, however, as it rapidly becomes apparent he's just a lecherous mental patient in a lab coat, looking for an excuse to gawk at/fondle female patients/nurses. He's not trying very hard, though; he even admits it to you at one point. Eight years later, though, in Apollo Justice, he's still at it.

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Referenced in this Chasing The Sunset strip.
In 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.
I'm not sure what the trope vocabulary is for this Penny Arcade strip, but it's funny. Does that count?

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Fatebane's favorite tactic in Associated Space.

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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.
- This came as a surprise to the others, because, in a much straighter version of the "don enemy uniforms to infiltrate their base" strategy, they were trying not to be seen, and the uniforms were a flimsy backup in case they were spotted. It had never occurred to them that actually pretending to be maintenance techs might work.
The Eds try to scam Johnny with one of these at the beginning of the Ed Edd N Eddy episode "Urban Ed", disguising it as a game of Calvin Ball:
Eddy: That's home plate, and here's the banana!
Johnny: Banana?
The Mad Hatterbot in Futurama's insane robot asylum episode did this. Other characters do it too, but mostly without success.
In one of the episodes of Wacky Races, Dick Dastardly and Muttley use a fire engine horn and the other racer's respect for authority to pass right by them to the front of the pack. Dastardly even calls it the "Old Phony Fire-Engine Routine".

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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.
- Except when someone starts asking the wrong questions and being insistently helpful, as at least one would-be thief found to their chagrin.
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.
- In fact, they planned to put this sequence in the film as well, but there was one problem: Bystanders kept falling for it and trying to give Leonardo DiCaprio their money as they were trying to film the scene.
  - Considering how famous DiCaprio is and they still fall for this, is it any surprise Abagnale succeed?
- Early on in Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, Mr. Wednesday uses the exact same trick, even fooling a police officer.
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.
- To elaborate on the APEC stunt, they rented a limo, stuck miniature Canadian flags on it and marched clean through a AU$4,000,000 security perimeter. It may be found in all its glory here.
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.
- Not only that, but the fake authority figures gained ridiculous and dangerous levels of obedience from ordinary people. In the original experiment, people thought they had killed a person by obeying authority, yet vastly more than 75% of them kept obeying.
- Also noteworthy is the sickening Stanford Prison Experiment, led by Milgram's college friend Zimbardo, and cut off early because after only six days (of an intended two week experiment), randomly assigned "guards" tortured the randomly assigned prisoners simply because of the social role.
- The Milgram Experiment has been replicated under various guises since then and yes, it still demonstrates the same results or even worse ones. Even with psychology students who know really should know better after having studied the original. Human beings tend to use social short-hand a lot, and as long as you use the right one for the situation, this will work with pretty much anyone. This is why it's so vital to have explicit and well-defined security procedures like those detailed in the next example.
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 IDs.
- That's an excellent procedure, because on 2 July 2000, 15 men dressed in senior officers' uniforms, driving civilian jeeps painted up to look like military vehicles, entered a Malaysian army base using this method. They apparently convinced the base armoury personnel to hand over more than 100 assault rifles and grenade launchers to them, and left before anyone realized something was wrong. See BBC News.
- Luckily an increasing number of facilities are becoming Genre Savvy to this and implementing what might seem to be unreasonably strict security measures in order to ensure it can't happen, generally of the "no access without valid ID, even if you're my friend/boss/sibling" sort.
Convicted cracker Kevin Mitnick used this as his primary criminal method. Among crackers and computer security professionals, this is called social engineering.
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
Telstar Logistics can park anywhere.
Scott Adams said that he'd tell women he was interested in that he was an expert on handwriting analysis. He'd get them to write their name and ask them to write the things they liked about him. Once they were in the mindset of thinking appreciative things about him, some would include a phone number.
- Not the only time Adams has taken advantage of this tendency, either. Wearing only a toupee and a fake mustache and peddled as a consultant by Logitech's co-founder, he got into a high-level meeting at the company and spouted a wide load of nonsense. Everyone nodded along and he succeeded in getting them to create a completely meaningless mission statement before the hoax was revealed.
  - Wearing only a toupee and fake moustache, you say? That must have been awkward....
Phishing. By far the biggest reason why any online service tells you that representatives will never ask for your password.
A story of a kid trying to do this with Steam on an online chat client: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/31/1655259
Dave Barry and a few cartoonists once got into the 2000 Democratic National Convention by dressing up in dark suits with sunglasses, and sticking phone cords in their ears to pretend they were the security detail for Richard Riordan, then-mayor of Los Angeles. (The mayor was in on it, but the convention's security detail and doormen were not.)
The story of Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator, in which a couple of ex-contractors managed to get Apple to release their software by pretending they still worked there. One of the best examples from the article: "[Greg] told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive."
Many of Joey Skaggs' greatest pranks are predicated on the Bavarian Fire Drill. The best of these was The Solomon Project, where Skaggs (as Dr. Joseph Bonuso) actually got on CNN to shill a computer that could replace judges. Even better, though, was the fact that this was the fifth time Skaggs had snowed CNN this way.
A somewhat famous theft from the Hudson's Bay Company building in downtown Winnipeg involved two people walking in, taking a canoe, putting it over their heads as though they were simply moving the display, and walking straight out the door with it, never to be seen again.
- A friend did something similar during a Lord of the Rings promo at a Wal-Mart - he walked up to a clerk, pointed at a four-foot-tall cardboard cutout of Gandalf, and said, quote: "Your manager said I could have that." To this day, the cutout remains in said friend's apartment.
A german Newsmagazine tested this with an actor. He would stop cars while talking into a normal cellphone and claim to be a police officer, needing the car for an ongoing chase, as his partner is already pursuing the criminal with their patrol car. Even more disturbing than the number of people immediately giving their keys where the ones handing over the car after checking the ID. It was a cheap plastic card, the picture badly glued on it, and the word "Police" misspelled.
- This is actually justified in Germany: When you deal with a police officer in full uniform, you have no right to see his ID, ask him for his name or even express reasonable doubts about his authority. Many people have been punished for Resistance against Law Officers, with Germany's highest courts backing this up.

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