And that will only be hilarious to people that have seen the IT Crowd. Best. episode. ever.
But back to the actual point. I was cruising along at work on my last 12 hr shift (midnight to midday) and decided I’d like something to eat. It was about 3:30am which seem as good a time as any but it wasn’t to be because as I was about to do it the fire alarm went off! Fortunately, my security pass has the instructions on what to do in this case. Although, I think they were the instructions for business hours not weekends at 3am. So I sit and wonder if it will turn off or if the beep, beep, beep will continue forever. It didn’t, it became the scary wooop, wooop of “get the hell out! We’re on fire!” and then a strange english man recording came on the PA and told me to calmly evacuate and go to the designated evacuation point.
So I calmly packed my stuff and walked out but didn’t know where the evacuation point was. I was told it is actually a block away! There was no way I was walking down there at 3:30am. So I waited outside for the fire brigade to come and fortunately, our technically minded people had been working down at the data centre (about 5mins drive away from the office) and had just finished up when this all occurred. So they also turned up and kept me company as the firemen went through and pretended to inspect the building.
I say pretend because they didn’t actually have full access to the building, including the floor they believed the issue to be on! They also didn’t talk to us or tell us what was going on. The simply, turned the alarm off and left. We assumed it was safe to enter. Which, 6hrs later, it appears it was.
I will say, that I was afraid to turn the sandwich press on for fear of sparking the smoke detectors and having the issue happen again. Stupid? Sure, but you never know.
6 responses to “Fire, exclamation mark.”
6 hours?! Oh, wow, what a grandious waste of that time that sounded like lol. Sorry you had to spend your evening like that.
I love how sometimes it appears that the firemen don’t actually do anything, though they’re probably just happy for a break from the huge fires.
At least it kept things interesting for you for a night!
Wow! What a night you had a work. I have never had a fire alarm at any job I have worked at.
It almost seems like someone turned on the alarm to see what would happen, I mean you never know, but..6 hours is a bit of a long wait to safetly enter the building again. For the firermen not to even utter a word as to what was going on is even stranger. I would be afraid to turn anything on after that, so I don’t blame you about the sandwitch press. I do hope your days at work have turned out better.
Oh wows. I’ve never seen the IT Crowd… actually no, thats a lie.. the only thing I’ve seen of it is the bloopers/outtakes on Youtube haha.
Ah. We had a fire at our college in December. We had to stand outside for three hours in the bitter, freezing cold. It took fire engines an hour to arrive.. Psh bad service or what!?
Haha the IT Crowd! I remember that episode!!!
Yikes, fire alarms are such a hassle… especially when you can’t tell what’s going on. At jazz school last Monday, the fire alarm went off at 9am, which, to us meant that it was a proper alarm, not a drill, becauset here are no classes on at 9am. Lo and behold, 4 fire trucks rocked up, inspected the building and then left. Apparently one of the builders working in some corner had set the alarm off with the dust he was making – silly huh? Anyway, its good you were careful about it because whenever the alarm goes off, it costs thousands of dollars.