Fire?

Today at 4:30pm the office alarm went off. It's an offensive, shrill thing, accompanied by flashing lights specially designed to disorient you so that you get lost and burn to death in a filing room or break your neck stumbling down the stairs. The alarm was accompanied by an announcement which said something about using the stairs and going to your designated re-entry point, but the only effect of this, seeing as how no-one could make out what was being said, was to cause everyone to hang about and try to figure it out. They were all discussing what they thought the announcement had said and how to interpret it. Had there been a real fire we'd probably have lost about thirty people left behind listening to the announcement.

In this case, however, we had no idea whether the emergency was a fire or not; the announcement just said "emergency". To start with people gathered in the bottom corridor, as though this was a tornado drill, but then a few of us pointed out that we should probably go outside, in spite of the arse-biting cold. At this point, had the emergency been a tornado, we might have been blown to our deaths, but staying inside with a fire could have led to us been roasted alive. Seems like they'd have a system for this, right?

Outside, once I recovered from the shock of the cold and my testicles retreating upwards, we wandered over to a point where we vaguely remembered some previous drill taking place, at the entrance to the office multi-storey car park. It being 4:30pm a lot of people had decided just to sneak off home early so the big risk to our safety was neither fire nor tornado but getting run over by some bitch from accounting in an oversized SUV as she struggled to see over the fucking steering wheel. Time went by and my ears lost sensation. A woman with a clipboard and an orange vest came over and asked if any of us had taken a headcount.

"What's the bloody point of that? We have no idea who came here and who went to the other end of the building, nor do we know how many people should be here on any given day and how many are off sick, traveling or on vacation. Plus half of them went home - you may have seen one just a minute ago with an HR assistant stuck in her tire treads."

So the hopeless woman in the orange vest asked us if there was anyone we had seen down our end of the building who we hadn't seen outside. We gave a few names. Did she rush off to check whether they were at that moment burning to death inside the office, caught in the middle of a large bowel movement or lapsed into a coma at their desk? Did she fuck. She made a couple of notes on the clipboard and sidled off uselessly. Meanwhile, in a cacophony of sirens and accompanying light display, the fire brigade arrived, finally indicating that this was not a tornado warning but a fire alarm. Probably.

After another ten minutes, which felt like an hour, during which my entire head lost feeling and I seriously considered getting a stupid wool hat out of my car, we were given the all clear and traipsed back into the office. The entire exercise confirmed that in the event of a real fire we would likely lose half the office population, burned to a cinder as they wandered aimlessly around, attempting to figure out where to go. They'd be the lucky ones though; it took fifteen minutes for my ears to come back to life and I'm still not sure my nuts have recovered. Between freezing half to death and being run over by ignorant coworkers, next time I think I'd rather take my chances inside.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison