My building has a hyperactive fire alarm. Now this is a good thing and a bad thing. It's good because if there is actually ever a fire we'll all know about it and be able to get out unharmed. The bad part of this is that when the time comes that there is an actual fire none of us are going to believe the fire alarm and we're all going to burn up in a horrific death.
Now when I say it's hyperactive I mean that almost everything sets it off. It went off once because someone was taking a shower in the middle of the night and the steam set it off. Where I am, we don't get many fire alarms in the middle of the night. We've only had one so far. At Hillhead I've heard there have been at least 4 or 5. It's the benefit of not living where most of the other Freshers live because most of the people here don't get nearly as drunk and stupid. Some do, but not in the same proportion as at Hillhead (they have a cheap bar at the activity centre there). It was an interesting time this late night fire alarm. My flatmate Vivi and I ended up coming out of our rooms at the same time. Both of us had a look of, "This better be a real fire or else." It wasn't and I'm slightly happy about that because I forgot my glasses and I wasn't wearing contacts so if there had been a fire I would have been blinded until January.
The reason I am bringing up the fire alarm now, 2 months since I've lived here, is because of what happened today. It happened before. The first day I was here it went off just after I got out of the shower I took to get the 20+ hours of travel off. I scrambled to get clothes on and got as far as the hallway before the fire alarm shut off. Ok, I can deal with that. But this morning I didn't have to wake up at any specific time. It's reading week for my Gaelic and English classes so I don't have class until after noon all days except Friday. So about 10:30 I stepped into my shower and turned on my jazz songs and started singing along. About two minutes into the shower I realized that there was a noise that wasn't part of the song. It was the fire alarm. I let out a sigh, switched off the water, and quickly dried off. I did this and got clothes on all in under a minute and started heading down when the alarm stopped. I mumbled an inappropriate four letter word and turned back to my room hoping that the alarm had shut off because there was not a fire and not because the fire had disrupted the circuits. My thought was that I was going to be in the shower so I would be dripping with water and therefore I would take less time to burn up in fire.
*sigh* (looks towards to sky) Erin is not amused, Sir. Not amused one little bit.
Hillhead is a proper nightmare. Once, in december last year I think, we had alarms three days in a row (mon-wed). All around 2am.
ReplyDeleteWe were cold, tired, and very lucky we never found out who triggered it, or we would probably have done something bad :P