Let it be known that I have been extremely tired for about a week and a half. So I’ve been going to bed early in order to try to get the maximum amount of sleep I can wring out of my less-than-ideal schedule.
Today at about 2:30 AM, the fire alarm in my apartment building decided to interfere with this noble cause.
I woke up to some kind of repetitive, distant noise and stared blearily around at the darkness of my bedroom. After about five minutes I managed to make the necessary mental connection. The fire alarm was going off! Bugger. I knew it couldn’t possibly be an actual fire; this alarm has a remarkable tendency to go off unnecessarily. Nevertheless, menacing visions of having to actually get out of bed and dress myself danced through my brain. I muzzily decided that I would be better off going back to sleep, and spent a productive fifteen minutes or so imagining in rich detail what would happen if I were blinded and maimed by the hypothetical fire. Yet the cursed alarm did not permit me my slumber.
Time passed. I wondered if perhaps I should phone up the fire department and ask if they’d noticed the alarm yet. I estimated that it had been going strong for half an hour with no announcements from either the security guard or a representative of the department. This thought entertained me for yet more time; then I went back to the “blinded in the fire” imaginary story. Finally, the fire department representative made an announcement over the alarm speakers. Joy! I didn’t care about anything he said until the last sentence; “you can go back to sleep”, or words to that effect, was the Holy Grail of my rest-deprived existence. Better yet, it was followed by a blessed cessation of the alarm. I snuggled happily into my blankets and prepared to go back to sleep.
But no. Apparently, the universe hates me just that little bit more. Just as I was finally in that precarious state between sleeping and waking, the alarm speakers made that peculiar chime that proclaims the beginning of an announcement. There was the security guard’s voice. I transcribe what I remember of his speech, though my memory is blurred by my rage and exhaustion at the time:
“Mumble mumble mumble fire department mumble mumble mumble investigated mumble mumble mumble you can go back to sleep.”
…What?! That’s it? You woke me up, five bloody damn minutes after the fire department guy turned off the bloody damn alarm, to say exactly what he said only quieter so I can’t hear all the words? You, in fact, prevented me from going to sleep in order to inform me that I could go back to sleep, in case I hadn’t heard it the first time? Bastard! Idiot! Cursed, incompetent peon! May termites consume your place of dwelling! May drunken Valkyries carouse under your bedroom window for days on end, bellowing improvised odes to your astounding lack of wits! Graaaaah! :mad:
[sub](In case you can’t tell, that rage and exhaustion is still going strong.)[/sub]
When i read in the papers about people who die in fires, i sometimes wonder how many of them are the sort of morons who always assume that a fire alarm is a false alarm.
Because in the four years that I have lived in this building, we have had about fifty false alarms and several "Oops, we forgot to tell you we were testing"s. Our building fire evacuation policy is “stay in your apartment”. (I’m not sure if that’s the <i>official</i> fire evacuation policy, but every time we have an alarm the security guard announces for us all to stay where we are.)
There are several problems, as I see it. Building management is responsible for engaging the services of qualified personnel to maintain a fire alarm system such that it doesn’t initiate false alarms. The local municipality should be fining the ever loving crap out of building management if the system is creating that number of false alarms. Presuming the alarm to be just another false call ends up leading to a large body count when the real deal happens. Going back to sleep is much easier than going back to alive.
If it ever turns out to be an actual fire, I’m presuming that the security guard will have the wits to announce it as such. Meanwhile, I’ll follow the “stay in your apartment” direction.
I live in a freshman dorm. You wouldn’t believe the number of drunk guys attempting to make popcorn that set the damn popcorn bag on fire in the early hours of the morning. Come on, guys, there’s a popcorn button on the microwave!
Well, that’s your choice, but I wouldn’t trust my health and safety to a security guard. Most people do not realize the speed with which fire grows in volume and intensity, rapidly making escape routes impassable. I’m with the “Get out Early and Alive” gang.
I once had an appointment in the early morning. I’m not a morning person but my mother is. So I asked her to wake me up at 6:00 am so I could get to where I was going on time. That morning my mother got a phone call saying that my appointment had been cancelled.
So my mother woke me up at 6:00 am to tell me the appointment was cancelled and I didn’t have to get up.
Now I love my mother but after only four hours of sleep I was kind of annoyed and I may have been snarling a little when I asked her why anyone would wake somebody up to tell them they didn’t have to wake up. She didn’t get it and seemed to think what she did was perfectly reasonable.
Attention students. This is campus security. The fire department has completed their investigation. You are on fire. Please do not go back to sleep. Thank you, and have a nice day.
Well, of course it was! What, she should have let you wake up and see how late it was and have a heart attack because you thought you’d missed your appointment? What kind of mother would do that to her child?
Well, maybe she thought you’d set your alarm too and if she hadn’t phoned you you’d have left for your appointment at 6am which would have been infinitely more annoying than being woken up for a few minutes.
This was years ago when I was still living at home. And the reason she was waking me up was because my alarm clock was broken, which she knew. Nope, as she explained it, she woke me up to tell me I could keep sleeping. In my mind, and I still feel this way, the best way to let someone keep sleeping is to let them keep sleeping.
And science backs me up on this - side-by-side comparisons have been done on people who were sleeping; half were woken up and half were allowed to sleep. Scientists that tabulated the results and found the results clearly indicated a strong linkage existed between sleeping and sleeping with an equally strong inverse linkage between being awake and sleeping.
It just completely astounds me that anybody could even conceive that it is at all reasonable to remain in a building for a full half-hour with a fire alarm blaring. Were you never taught that fire alarms always mean one and only one thing: “GET OUT NOW!!”
I might feel some sympathy for you if you’d had to wait in the parking lot for a half-hour while the cause of the alarm was investigated. However any sympathy I might have felt is completely negated by the complete stupidity of your response.
People who respond to potential emergencies like you do end up dead in real emergencies.
There was an interesting article in Time magazine a few months ago that explored how people reacted to crises, such as airplane accidents. The people who tend to survive crises are those who plan their actions in advance, such as mentally rehearsing the path they’d take to the nearest exit. IIRC, one example given was an accident where a plane ran off the end of the runway and caught fire. Approximately half of the passengers survived, while half did not. One couple in particular was able to calmly get up, proceed to the nearest exit, and exit the burning plane. Their seatmate, on the other hand, appeared to be baffled by the situation she found herself in. She was unhurt when they last saw her, but for some reason she never got herself moving. She didn’t survive.
:eek: :smack: