I don't know what it about fire alarms that gets me happy. I guess it's because the only time I experienced a legitimate one was in college, when someone's mattress caught on fire, but no one got hurt. All the other times, the fire alarm going off has amounted to a fire drill.
Maybe it's that I forgot to grow up? Fire alarm = leaving the classroom = good? A minute ago, the emergency lights on the wall started flashing, accompanied by a piped-in voice, asking for our attention. I was all ready to pick up my bag and head outdoors to the glorious sunshine.
Dashed! The voice proceeded to inform us that there had been a false alarm on the second floor, triggered by construction. Being many floors higher, we didn't hear the false alarm. In a matter of seconds, my hopes rose and then fell. Have to stay inside. Shucks.
Posted by Shokufeh at June 19, 2003 11:02 AMyeah, i can relate. we always did tornado drills in school - didn't love the whole "hide under your desk and pray it doesn't get whirled up into a funnel cloud" thing, but the break from the everyday schedule rocked.
Posted by: delara on June 19, 2003 11:16 AMThat sounds traumatizing.
Our local fear as children did not involve a drill, just the anticipation that everything we knew and loved would one day be covered by water. We were constantly reminded in school that New Orleans would sink soon, and that the Mississippi river might finally succeed in changing course, despite the levees.
Right now, fire alarm = bad. Ours woke us up at 6:00 am last week. We dragged ourselves out of bed, put on clothes, stepped into the hallway, opened the door to the stairwell, and -- wha? Fire alarm stopped. False alarm at 6:00 am = bad.
Posted by: +mojan. on June 19, 2003 04:46 PMI would agree with that. I think my college classmates that lived in the dorm that was always having 2am fire alarms doesn't share my affinity for them
I'm glad your DSL is back. Yay!
Posted by: shokufeh on June 20, 2003 09:24 AMMy Feelings for Fire Alarms... a short history
High School: LOVED them. My freshman year there were 39 drills!! 39! They even announced it at graduation that year, congratulating the retiring principal for having been the first in the history of the district to have survived that many. Basically, it was like having a recess, if there wasn't a fire drill by 3rd period, you knew it would happen any moment. Of course, so many eventually yielded cruel and unusual punishment from school administration, including the disappearance of all trash cans and toilet paper in the bathrooms. Yeah, some of us actually had to bring our own toilet paper to school.
College -- HATED them. Because they were always at 3, 4, 5 in the morning, when I'd just gotten to bed and just started dreaming. And they were always in the winter. And I was always in my jammies.
Posted by: kari on June 23, 2003 02:28 PMMan, Kari. You had some really creative people at your school, to pull off 39 fire drills. I've probably had that many in my whole life.
Posted by: shokufeh on June 23, 2003 02:43 PMAh yes, my peers were creative in many ways. First of all, the fire drills -- caused by, as was mentioned previously, burning notebooks, paper towels and toilet paper in trash cans. Then there was the more direct method of lighting matches next to smoke detectors. Then there was the discovery that spraying hairspray directly into the smoke detector would cause the same reaction.
Then there was the creativity in illustrating one's rage with one's classmates. I've got a whole litany of action-packed fight stories, if anyone's interested.
Oh and I mustn't forget the obligatory bomb threats -- though, those might be pretty commonplace. And the days of wreaking of weed after leaving my first hour class. And the guy who wore a dress to his homecoming coronation. And the time I asked an expelled student to tag his name all over a stairwell, on behalf of an administratively sanctioned project and then subsequently spent half of my winter vacation painting over his work...
Don't get me wrong, I loved high school. Never a dull moment.
Posted by: Kari on June 24, 2003 08:01 AM