this is a drill.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006: 11:07 AM

I'm sitting at my desk, working on a crossword puzzle crucial and incredibly important software task, when a buzzer starts going off. This is different from the periodic beep from one of the many surge protectors around the office, this is continuous and really annoying. I turn down my music and realize that it's a fire alarm. It's been a long time since I've heard a fire alarm, and so I'm not sure what to do. Then I remember my years of training and I suddenly feel some sort of Pavlovian urge to exit the building, like now. So I save my work on my incredibly important software task, even going so far as to save it to the company server. That way, if my computer were to burn down, my work would not be lost. Of course, the server is in a room in this building on this very same floor, so my precaution was probably pointless.

People start to stream past my door toward the exit. Some of them stream the other way, saying that they were going to get their jackets or maybe some marshmallows. Even with all those years of training in school, fire alarms do not have the same effect on adults as they do on children. Little kids immediately react, knowing to leave everything behind and file quietly to the nearest exit, testing all doorknobs with the backs of their hands. Adults pause for ten to fifteen seconds to see if the alarm will stop on its own before leisurely grabbing personal effects, then chatter and joke as they burst through doorways. Some of them probably try to use the elevator. At some point in all our years of drills, we lost the idea that a fire could be very very scary. I remember still doing fire drills in high school, but they were a joke, something that had to be done to meet regulations somewhere. The teacher always told us when they were going to happen so we could go ahead and be ready. I had one teacher who even had the habit of screaming, "Oh my God, we're going to die!" to scare the freshmen students during the first fire drill of the school year.

I guess as adults we figure that we have the sense to assess the gravity of the situation. There was no smoke or screaming or any other indication that there was a real emergency at hand, so we determined that haste or panic was not necessary. We teach kids to just react, not sniff the air and decide if they have enough time to run to the bathroom first. If we had assessed the situation and determined there was real danger, we would have known exactly what to do, because if nothing else can be said for public schools, the system at least taught us how to make for the hills.

And then we stood outside for 20 minutes while the fire trucks came and the people with funny suits went inside and officially certified what we had already determined: there was no fire. Some of us went to lunch, others of us discusssed offsite data backup options. Me, I just felt bad for the people downstairs. You see, our office is upstairs from an OB/GYN office, and I just know there was some poor woman naked except for a thin medical sheet, lying with her feet in stirrups, enjoying the one-of-a-kind feeling of a speculum when the alarm went off. No amount of elementary school fire drills can prepare you for something like that.