Where's The Fire?

Like most people who work in large office buildings I try to ignore fire alarms as long as possible. When an alarm sounds everyone just sort of mills around until enough people have decided to take it seriously that everyone leaves. I work on the 25th floor and there is no way in hell I’m walking down that many flights of stairs unless there is a grave emergency.

Unlike most people I like to get into work early. Mainly so that I can leave early, I enjoy the fact that I’m already home from the gym by the time most people are leaving work. The added bonus is that I get to fart around for an hour or hour and a half before most of the office starts showing up to work. It’s great, I don’t get why everyone who can do this doesn’t. I mean I’ve figured out a way to work a normal 9 hours, be home by quarter after 4, and really only actually do 5 or 6 hours of work a day. It’s genius really.

There is however, one instance when these two ideas conflict. When the fires alarm goes off at 7:20 in the morning it happens for a reason one would assume. They don’t run fire drills when there are only 12 people in the building. Not wanting to die in a blazing tower inferno myself and the 2 other people in the office at the time evacuated. Walking down 25 flights is not the ideal way to start the morning though so we decided to ignore all safety precautions and take the elevator. Well the elevators weren’t working, perhaps some sort of automatic shut off when the alarm goes off, so we had to take the stairs. Eventually we make it to the bottom. At this point I was pretty tired and pissed off so if there wasn’t a roaring fire I was not going to be happy.

So what caused the alarm to sound? The elevators weren’t working. So not only did we unnecessarily walk down the steps from the top of a 300 foot building, the elevators were broken and we couldn’t use them to get back up.

Dammit.