FIRE ALARM

The room was suddenly filled with the sound of a wailing siren. I looked up from the laptop. It always takes four or five seconds for everyone to work out that it's not Tuesday 11am and it's not the weekly fire alarm test.

"That's real," said Chris as we all pushed our chairs back and filed towards the door. I glanced out of the window to check whether it was still raining. The lake was being bulleted with rainwater and the sky was grey and angry. Brilliant.

We marched towards the stairwell, along with everyone else, silently following the ritual while the bells rang in our ears.

We've been doing this a while. All the way from Primary School, we're told the rules: don't run, don't panic, don't stop to pick up your things, just carefully and calmly follow everyone else to the fire exit.

It really was raining. I thrust my hands into my pockets as the whole company gathered under the roof of the car park. Someone made the customary joke about whether or not we should all line up in alphabetical order, and everyone else made the custom response of laughing a little more than was necessary.

There's very little to do on a fire drill. We all watched of course, waiting for the flames to lick around the eaves of the building, or for a glass window to shatter in a cloud of thick black smoke.

None of that happened. A security guard drove into the car park, rushed into the building and tried to disable the alarm. Then, moments later, an electrician arrived with a toolbox. The rain pounded on.

It's good thinking time. I shuffled on my heels, trying to remember as many capital cities as I could and then asked Junko whether Japanese people go to the beach. She told me that they don't so I told her about my childhood eating sandwiches in the rain.

Then, weirdly, I got to thinking about Roger Federer. I was just thinking about how great tennis players make life look so easy, and how there must be a level all of us can get to where everything just flows with confidence and smoothness - in whatever we do.

The security guard emerged from the revolving door and waved at the fire marshalls, who were taking the opportunity to have a quick smoke. I suddenly found that really funny and started chuckling to myself - someone looked at me as though I'd gone a bit mad, so I pulled myself together. It was one of those things where explaining it would actually make it less funny.

It wasn't long before we were all making our way back inside. It had been an 'electrical fault' apparently.

I rather like the fact that fire drills have been part of life for so long. In a strange way, those funny few minutes outside break up the dreariness of the day - like a meeting where everyone has to turn up.

It is one of the few things that all of us do together - what's more, we're all equals out there under the concrete roof of the car park. The CEO is just as important as the cleaner when it comes to the intrinsic value of our lives. There's no politics, no-one can click 'tentative' and then go and play table football instead - no-one can even use their workload as a massive excuse. It's run... I mean calmly walk to the nearest fire escape... for your lives, which, need anyone remind you, are way more important than anything in your inbox.

Quite right.