Fire alarms are these strange events that cause people to panic in a non-panicky sort of manner. It’s as though people know they should panic, but they’re not sure if it’s worth the effort. And then they get all twitter-pated… but not in a very useful or relevant way. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you’re at school or work, and the fire alarm goes off, which of the following reactions are you most likely to have:
a) Holy crap! The building is on FIRE!
b) Oh no. I was right in the middle of something important. I’m just going to finish typing this email before I exit.
c) I can’t find my purse! Where is my purse? I can’t leave without my purse!!!!!
d) Sweet! A fire alarm! This will get me away from work/school/math test for at least 15 minutes!
I’m going to guess that in the absence of obvious evidence to the contrary (such as smoke or flames) most people will probably have reaction (d), as I will explain momentarily. However, to be fair, I have seen reactions (b) and (c) enough times to know they exist. Once I witnessed this phenomenon reach ridiculous proportions when a woman was so panicked about finding her purse that we nearly had to drag her out of the office against her will. I guess she overlooked the possibility that the building might actually be engulfed in flames and she could only assume that the cleaning crew was sure to steal her purse while she was waiting outside.
But anyway, getting back to my main point. I have never, in all of my experience, seen anyone react to a fire alarm with genuine fear of dying in a fire. I propose that the reason has to do with a complex system of Pavlovian psychological conditioning. This conditioning starts in grade school, when they have pre-planned fire alarms that everyone knows about in advance. The teacher is calm and enjoying the chance to sneak a cigarette, the kids are excited about going outside, and everyone seems genuinely happy about the whole experience.
This particular conditioning gets repeated biannually from kindergarten through senior year of high school. That’s 24 instances of being conditioned to believe that fire alarms = vacation. So then, when we grow up and have to deal with these situations in the real world, we don’t really have the capacity for what you might call a “realistic” response.
Last summer, I was finally de-programmed from this unfortunate conditioning, and I now view fire alarms with, if not panic, at least a healthy dose of annoyance. And while I still don’t really take fire alarms seriously, I at least don’t look forward to them anymore. Here’s what happened:
I work in a three-story government office. Last summer our building had an amazing amount of fire alarms. I think in the span of three months we may have had 10 different alarms. At first it was kind of fun, because summer’s a slow time around the office and it was something to do. Hanging out in the parking lot for an hour at a time felt cool…like the kids in high school who would skip class to go smoke in their car.
After a while though, it started getting really old. I’d be in the middle of reading a really great humor website, or my favorite song had just come up on Pandora, or I had poured myself a fresh cup of coffee, or I’d just started to doze off and then “REEEEEEEE REEEEEEEE REEEEEEEEE. BZZ BZZ BZZ. REEEEEEEE. REEEEEEE. REEEEEE…..”
The fire alarms started getting really disruptive and it was hard for me to get into my summer routine of doing nothing. Security had called in specialists ranging from actual firemen to electricians and maybe even a psychic or two. It seemed an unsolvable mystery, why, at least once a week, we’d have a fire alarm. I think at some point the fire trucks just stopped coming…which was really reassuring.
Anyway, toward the end of summer – and I’m still not 100% sure how they figured this out, or if it was just a really astute guess – security informed us that the cause of the fire alarms was an overly ambitious use of Lysol “Summer Flower Mix” air freshener in the ladies bathroom.
That’s right. The cause of numerous disruptions throughout the summer resulting in untold loss of government efficiency and wasted taxpayer dollars was caused by someone in the ladies bathroom on the third floor who was so embarrassed by the smell of her poop that she used enough Lysol to set off THE FIRE ALARM. On multiple occasions.
So now they’ve put the kibosh on any further use of air fresheners in the bathrooms at our office. But to be fair, they’ve made this restriction across the board, for both men and women. I don’t really frequent the men’s bathroom that often, but I have a feeling they aren’t really wild about air fresheners in there in the first place.
The ladies bathroom, on the other hand is now actually quite tolerable. I guess I’d never noticed before how the Lysol had really made the whole bathroom smell like a funeral at a feed lot. Now it just smells like a bathroom, and I’ll take the smell of poop over a weekly fire alarm any day.
Bob
August 31, 2010
I worked in a printing factory for a couple of years where the fire alarm thing was sometimes, in the winter, two or three times a week. Because we had tons of explosive chemicals the fire dept. had to respond each and every time. But near the end it was, oh crap here we go again, hope they have the coffee on for us this time.
In the end turns out the extreme winter cold here in Winnipeg was shorting something out and setting off the alarms. But the really funny thing, on the two or three times we actually DID have a small fires or situations in the plant. The alarms of course failed to work.
Needless to say I got out of there as soon as I could go back to building airliners for a living again.
TheresaFrances
August 31, 2010
Oh, that’s priceless…in a bad way. We have the occasional fire alarm where I work and NO ONE moves unless one of the librarians directs us to do so.
7.75
August 31, 2010
The Pavlonian link is genius!
Maybe it was something she ate that set off the alarms..?
Conflicted Mean Girl
August 31, 2010
Due to a very old oven at our house growing up, I was conditioned to react to a fire alarm by opening all the windows and rushing for some potholders to wave beneath the sensor in the front hallway. It never occured to any of us to actually leave the premises.Imagine my confusion at the first fire drill in grade school.
marinasleeps
August 31, 2010
Your right. Your so damn right. Now I will start initiating the panic in my office so eventually everyone is screaming and there is mayhem every where.
I didn’t realize I had been brain washed about fire alarms.
I feel so … used!
Agatha82
August 31, 2010
What confuses me more, is those people who LONG to be the fire marshall or whatever they’re called. You know, the ones who have to wear a dorky neon yellow jacket and instruct others to leave. They wanted me to do that in one of the offices but I said no thanks, let some other twerp look like an idiot in that yellow jacket. Not my colour darling ha ha
Great post as always.
Des
August 31, 2010
That is so funny. A similar thing happened to me.
When I dormed at college a few years ago our buildings fire alarm was broken. It went off alllll the time. And it was the loudest, brightest…yes, brightest…(big blue lights would go off too) I have ever heard! We all thought we were going deaf shortly thereafter.
This was in our dorm so at any given hour, day or night we would have to go outside in the snow, wind, rain, and/or freezing cold for at least an hour…
Yes, our fire alarm was broken in the winter. Great times…
Sank
August 31, 2010
You’re a.. missing one.. “What the hell is that noise? Now what were we doing?”
Late at night. Fat Sank is sounds asleep in deep REM sleep. In his dream, the midget with the spatula, she starts wailing this high pitched scream. Won’t stop. Slowly I roust myself out of the Land of Oz and attempt to gain consciousness.
As I come too I realize that it’s the hallway fire alarm. Buzzing loudly. Really loudly.
Fat Sank gets up, stumbles in the dark, picks up his handy tennis racket which was leaning on the closet door, and proceeds to beat the alarm with the tennis racket until it’s hanging from the ceiling by a wire.
He (I) drops the racket and goes back to bed.
Mrs S. “What was that?”
Me “the smoke alarm”
Mrs S “Was something burning?”
Me “I don’t know, didn’t check” a minute later the midget was back and all was good.
Sank
August 31, 2010
Oh, BTW. had a female roommate at one time who used to spray glade over her stink pickles. You know whats worse than the nastiest smelling poop smell? That same poop smell mixed wiht Glade Fresh Breeze. The two odors fight it out in a death match that can kill your cockoraches and cause genetic damage.
Which reminds me.. that may explain somethings with my kids.
cinderski
August 31, 2010
Ha. I work in a government-owned building where we have had the occasional bomb threat. That’s pretty awesome…except when you have forgotten your purse and your phone. Chilling outside is fine until you get hungry/thirsty and have no money…
Boxed Elf
September 1, 2010
In college, we had a fire drill in my dorm room. Our fire door wouldn’t open, and since it was a long way to the next fire door, we’d have burned to death if there had been a real fire. Unless we’d gone out the windows, in which case we’d have bled to death after being stabbed by the plate glass. So our choices were “…or death.”
I’ll have the chicken.
girl normal
September 1, 2010
Cake or death! CAKE OR DEEEEEEEAAATH!
mairebran
September 1, 2010
Fantastic!
Pauline
September 3, 2010
“The cause of numerous disruptions throughout the summer resulting in untold loss of government efficiency and wasted taxpayer dollars was caused by someone in the ladies bathroom on the third floor who was so embarrassed by the smell of her poop that she used enough Lysol to set off THE FIRE ALARM. On multiple occasions.”
LOL! How many canisters of the stuff did she empty? Sheesh!
I used to live in an apartment building in which morons would pull the fire alarm repeatedly at 10-11pm on weekdays, so I pretty much view most fire alarms as just annoyances caused by idiots. I still vacate, but I don’t panic and rush out.
Laura
September 5, 2010
There’s also “is this really worth walking down all those flights of stairs?” I still remember how wobbly my legs felt the day after the fire alarm that caused me to evacuate my 23rd-floor hotel room in the middle of the night.
girl normal
September 8, 2010
Good point. Yeah…fortunately I only work on the third floor of a three floor building. But it’s still a pain in the ass to descend 3 flights of stairs if I happen to be wearing 4 inch stilettos.