We've had two fire alarms today. You'll remember of course, a couple of months ago I was given a yellow jacket and told I could be a deputy fire warden. Yippedy doo.
So this morning, at 8:15, the first fire alarm happened. The other fire wardens hadn't arrived. I panicked.
For a few seconds, while everyone filed neatly out of the fire exit, I pondered whether to put on that yellow jacket at all. No-one would know - or remember, I supposed. There's hardly anyone in yet anyway, I could just slip out the back with everyone else and pretend...
I didn't do that. I did the responsible thing, slipping into the jacket and staying behind to make sure all the rooms were empty. I figured that that was the right thing to do.
It's so strange to be inside a building that everyone else has evacuated. The sirens swirled into my head, louder than loud, while I pushed open doors and strolled between the desks. Part of me wondered what I would do if toxic smoke billowed out of a meeting room and I heard someone shouting for help.
That didn't happen. I eventually marched outside and joined everyone else in the car park.
"Did you check the toilets?" asked Jamie. My heart fell through my stomach. Silence. Someone else said, "Jamie!" and then Jamie said:
"What? Someone might be asleep on the bog! It could happen!"
Needless to say, I had forgotten to check the toilets.
I quickly reasoned that there was nobody asleep 'on the bog', though the weight of being wrong about that was suddenly enormous. Mind you, I don't particularly like the idea of having to wake up a slumbering colleague who's passed out far enough to not be able to hear the ear-piercing sound of the fire alarms either. In the unlikely event that that had happened to someone at 8:15 in the morning, I suspected that such a person would have already 'gone the way of Elvis'.
Oh my! Am I bad person? Did I just let someone perish in a hypothetical inferno? Did I accidentally gamble with someone's life?
Well, there's no going back in when you're out, even if you're a deputy fire warden. After a while, the engineer arrived to fix the fault in the alarm system and then everyone (all present and accounted for) was waved back inside.
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The second fire alarm happened just after 12pm. Peter was in by then, so we checked the floor together, including the toilets.
Then I went out and stood in the car park with the crowd of smoking, chatting, phone-checking people.
For the first time in a while, I suddenly felt small. I guess it was the jacket - I felt like I ought to have been doing something, like telling people not to stand in the road, but somehow I couldn't quite do that. All I could do was just sort of fade in to the crowd of six-footers. It seems the jacket had a gravitas which did not match my stature.
Then people kept coming up to me and asking whether or not they could go to lunch. That made me laugh - as if I could stop anyone going to lunch! The system is that once you're accounted for outside the building, you're clearly okay to do whatever you like - as long as whatever you like isn't nipping back inside the burning office block for a hot pastie and some chargrilled chicken.
After a few minutes, the sirens stopped and an official-looking security guard waved us all back in again... again.
With relief, I slipped the yellow jacket back into the drawer where it belongs. I kind of hope I don't have to use it any time soon.
I suddenly remembered that when Peter had given me that jacket, I had joked,
"Well, with great power comes great responsibility."
It certainly does.
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