If there is an alarm, I go outside.
Do you find yourself lonely, once you’re out there?
<slight hijack> Substitute people gambling in a casino and refusing to leave their machines during and after an armed robbery with three guys carrying machine guns and beating up staff around them because “We’re winning!”, and you’ll know what happened to me. Oh, and complaining that I couldn’t cash out wins, because, you know, it’s crime scene and I just got robbed at gunpoint and I’m a.) visibly hysterical and b.) not allowed to touch anything anyway. So ignoring a fire alarm is not terribly surprising. Though no less inexplicable. </slight hijack>
To the OP, I get out at work, cause yanno, at least I’m not actually working but standing around chatting for a while if it’s a false alarm, and this building has burnt to the ground once alread - at night, when there was nobody here, but still - and has been rebuilt.
Cheers,
G
Our home fire alarm goes off if the oven is being smoky, so my first instinct would be to check downstairs.
At school, you’re hustled out on your arse if you don’t go outside, so not much choice there.
I’ve never had a fire alarm at work yet.
All three fires were caused by a maintenance person who didn’t get the concept of welding and paper not mixing. The building has since been sold, and that maintenance person is not employed by the new owners.
We haven’t had a fire alarm since.
Most large, faceless organisations have such people to do this for them, but I’d go with your number 3 option, no way do I owe the university my life, not on what they pay me.
In this building, which is filled to the gills with flamable solvents and all sorts of things prone to igniting spontaneously, you get out. NOW. (we are permitted a moment to stabilize any ongoing reactions/processes if necessary) You evacuate to your designated location and report for head counting by your safety warden.
Failure to do so is grounds for dismissal. In fact, anyone leaving the building for any reason (going out to lunch) must let another person know so as to maintain the accuracy of the headcounting, although we are also logged by our id badges as we enter/exit the facility.
Fire alarms at work are serious business, although chances are it’s merely someone on the 3rd floor cooking bacon in the toaster oven again.
Speaking as a floor marshal: Thank you for making my job easier!
Every person I encounter and have to say “This isn’t a drill! Get out now!” only slows me down in my task of checking that our special needs people* have gotten out, not to mention getting *myself * out. If I have to tell a person to get off that conference call and get out, they will be the subject of an email to their direct manager, the building safety manager and the regional safety director.
- On my floor, I’ve got one person in a wheelchair, one who uses a cane and is close to needing a wheelchair, one blind person and two deaf people. They all have “buddies” but what happens if the buddy is at lunch or taking the day off?
Easy answers to an easy question.
What do you do when the fire alarm doesn’t go off but you see fire trucks pulling up in the street below your 14 story office building? My office mates and I watched from the 9th floor windows and wondered what’s happening. Until someone smelled smoke out by the elevators. At that point the division VP yelled at the top of his lungs “That’s it everybody out”. We left in an orderly manner. Turns out there was a fire in the building maintenance office. I knocked out the fire alarm system. The alarms never sounded on any floor.
My biggest mistake was that I was on the phone with my wife when the boss man issued the his evacuation order. The conversation went something like this: “Yeah we don’t know why the fire department is in the street we can’t even tell which building they’re going into…Oh someone just said they smelled smoke I have to go.” CLICK
Now this would have been fine if I called her on my cell 10 minutes later from the street. But my cell phone was plugged into the charger at home. She damn near killed me when I walked in the door 30 minutes later. I’m still getting grief for it.
In our case, the fire was in the lobby. We were staying at the Grand Californian at Disneyland the night after Christmas. Fire alarm goes off at 2am…turns out the giant Christmas tree in the lobby went up in flames after they had changed a string of the lights on it…plug it back in…FOOMPH! Up it goes.
Disney evacuated the entire building (it’s a big hotel) put half of us up in the conference center, the other half got to go stay in the California Adventure Park (lucky!). They brought us all coffee and pastries, brought diapers for people with babies, and comped everyone’s night that night. Pretty class act, that Disney.
Uh, anyway, my point was this.
Get out. Every time. Don’t be stupid.
I get out, but admit the urgency is dictated by where I am. I now work on the second floor (first floor to you Brits) in a three story building with many exits. In the event of a fire [drill], I close down my computer, take some work and my purse and keys and coat, and mosey out.
In the job before this, I worked on the 9th floor of a 10 story building, with a shit-load of other people and two main staircases to get down and out. I knew from drills that the stairwells would fill up with people packed in behind some employee who was old or fat or slow on the stairs and we would plod down inch by inch, me calculating how many times over we all would have died in the event of a real emergency.
In that job, I shot out of my chair, grabbed my purse and was as far down the stairs as possible within two minutes. This was post- 9/11 and my future did not (does not) include dying in the stairwell of a high-rise building.
I always go. The building where I used to work had a pressure problem in the sprinkler system which for some reason set off the alarms. We all went anyway, but I was on the first floor near the door so it was easy.
If I’m in a hotel, I’ll leave by the nearest fire exit. I would hope that the hotel staff would kick everyone out of the lobby in any case.
The most interesting place I’ve had to leave was the British Museum during a bomb scare. They just did one wing - my wife and our other daughter were in another wing and never knew about it.
I leave every time. I don’t want to end up a Darwin award nominee.
When I was a freshman in college there was a couple weeks where people thought it was funny to set off the fire alarm. Until we had a dorm meeting where one of the RAs described how every time the alarm went off, the disabled people on the 2nd floor crawled hand over hand to the fire wells to wait for rescue. Then it didn’t seem so funny any more.