Fire Fire

[Imogene]

I was truly YELLING at people to get the hell back!!

Hmmm... that story sounds familiar. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a video of this incident floating around the site somewhere?

[myswtghst]

At my old office we had the opposite problem. The fire alarm would go off in the building and management would come back and tell us "Don't worry about it, just keep taking calls". Mhmmkay. ><

We have similar situations all the time around here. Granted, they usually are just false alarms, but still...I'd hate to ignore it someday because I figure it's a false alarm.

I also tend to get the customers who can hear the fire alarm and still don't want to get off the phone. I'm sorry, if the building is burning down, I'm hanging up and I'm out.

And a story: we have alarms for severe weather (i.e. really bad storms and tornadoes) that go off every so often. When that happens, we're supposed to gather in a safe area and wait it out. I once watched security let a bunch of people go running out of the building into pouring rain and lightning while the sirens went, not even trying to stop them. Ah well, guess if the idiots die, it's their own fault.

[uknz76]

The last time we actually had a fire (just a little one), the fire alarms didn't work. Someone was doing maintenance on them and forgot to tell us! If you think it's hard to get customers out with a siren on try doing it without!

[DGoddessChardonnay]

People need to get their priorities in order. What's more important, their lives or their crappy merchandise? >_>

I'll give you three guesses as to what the average SC thinks on that one - first two don't count.

[Gurndigarn]

how about this one? Yeah, several businesses in the strip mall had employees in them. 9:00 PM, just as most of them were closing. Went right between WalMart and Kroger-- good thing, both were still open--

Go ahead, ignore this one.

[Purple Monkey Dishwasher]

Hmmm... that story sounds familiar. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a video of this incident floating around the site somewhere?

Nope. My bosses did not load the video recorders with tapes, ever, so, no, there is no video, and if I had been raped and murdered one day, the criminals would have got off scott-free! Good Times.

Joe

[Fera Festiva]

Every time we have a fire alarm (none of which are ever scheduled - so even if they're due to some idiot catering student burning their toast, we have to evacuate fully) the arseholes comes out in force. There's always at least one who says, "I hope you're going to write me a mitigating circumstances form explaining why my essay isn't finished. This is very inconvenient. Why don't you schedule these for more convenient times?" and so on.

Dude, we can assume the building is on fire. Get the hell out!

[Shabo]

We had fire alarms at my dorm building all the time because people didn't know how to cook. And they were wet apartments (meaning people could drink in them). Man, drunk college student + trying to cook for the first time = Really pissed off RA that has to deal with that at 3 am.

And yes, I did have to deal with that at 3 am. He was cooking pancakes. I chewed him out as nicely as I could.

We also had someone from the upper ranks pulling our fire alarms to test the response rate of the staff. At 5 pm. When people are at the residential cafe eating dinner. Hmmm, maybe there's a reason no one responds and it takes forever to clear the building? Don't yell at us for it. *grumbles* Yell at the stupid people who don't know how to cook! Oh yeah, and have fun getting drunk college students out of bed to evacuate the building. Even if you stand there and wait for them, they'll still go back to sleep. I say, if they're too lazy to get out of bed for a fire alarm, they deserve to burn.

Mmmmm, toasty.

[MadMike]

Hmmm... that story sounds familiar. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a video of this incident floating around the site somewhere?

I'm guessing that you're thinking of this incident.

Looking at the rest of the replies in this thread, apparently it's not the same person.

[MystyGlyttyr]

We have some sort of dangerous chemical kept in the back of the building...dangerous enough that if it starts escaping, we have something like a minute to leave before we DIE. So we have fairly frequent drills for bolting out if that happens.

No one's ever given us any crap, probably because anyone who doesn't run out with us gets left behind. Screw you guys, if the 65-year-old with two artificial hips can get down that flight of stairs and out the building that fast, I'm not coming back for you!

(A humorous comment from one of the reporters during the last drill..."Do you want us to do this the way we're supposed to, or the way we're actually going to?" )

[Delphae]

In college we had one night where the fire alarm malfunctioned at 3 a.m. multiple times in one night. The last time as I headed in the girls across the hall poked their heads out, wondering what was going on.
Last fall I got a call over the intercom "Delphae there is a fire out front" Some mulch had caught fire and I put it out with a fire extinguisher. No big deal.

[LadyAndreca]

I admit to having ONCE slept through a fire alarm in college. ONCE. Because the idiots installing the new system in our dorm crossed wires and it was going off 2-3 times a DAY, especially at around 2 AM and it was WINTER. My roommate and I were so exhausted from lack of sleep and being desensitized to the sound we had to be tossed out of the dorms by a very irritated campus cop. (The only time it went off for 'real', some drunk idiot sprayed a fire extinguisher into the AC system and the resulting cloud set off the detectors.)

This turned out to be a VERY dangerous thing last summer, when I almost rolled over and ignored the fire alarm in my apartment. Some shred of common sense told me to at least CHECK...and sent me scrambling down two flights of stairs in my PJs and sandals (with my keys and cell phone but without ID or money) because there was smoke billowing into my kitchen. Everyone got out, and I only lost a mattress and a pillow to smoke, but the fire department said that the smoke had been think enough to be deadly if we'd stayed in it.

I will NEVER ignore an alarm again.