So the other day the fire alarm went off again and everybody had to evacuate the building. Like the boy who cried wolf, nobody takes the fire alarm seriously anymore because it happens too often and it’s always a false alarm. This evacuation has to have been the slowest yet, as it probably took ten minutes to get the entire building cleared. Part of the problem was simply the timing of the fire alarm: it was close to the end of the day so many people began wrapping up what they were doing, saving all their work, filling out their time cards, and shutting down their computers. This can take a good amount of time, especially if you’re working on some big files.
Since everyone regards it as a false alarm, they take their time walking out too. The stairway was so crowded and slow moving that you could rest between each step. It makes you wonder if the panic of a real fire would speed things up or make them worse. In addition, the majority of this cattle herd forgot about the emergency exit doors and just headed out the long way past the main exit. Then we all stood in the parking lot and waited for the firemen to show up, inspect the building, and tell us everything’s okay..which it always is. Nobody knows whether the fire alarm going off was accidental or an intentional fire drill because the planned fire drills aren’t told to us in advance anyway, even though they should be.
But my all time favorite thing about the fire alarms is the blatant preference given to company procedure over the safety of our employees. As miserably slow as our evacuations already are, we have been directed to clean up our desks before evacuating “to not leave any proprietary information out where others can see it.” Can you believe it? There may be a raging fire ablaze on our roof, but we better keep our work hidden from those nosy firemen! Or maybe the Human Torch will come in looking for secrets?
Because the crap on my desk is more important than my life, I throw rocks.
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