The Fire Alarm

I don't know what I ever did to the St Cross fire alarm, but it's out to get me.  The first time it went off, I was in the shower.  The second time it went off, I was in my pajamas and no one else was.  The third time it went off...oh, the third time.

I was out late last night for a string orchestra concert, and by the time I got to sleep it was about 12:30am.  At 2:00am, the blaring fire alarm ejected me from my bed.  It's the kind of noise that is so offensive that it causes you to throw yourself out of bed and stand up before you actually stop sleeping.  Then when you do wake up, you find that you are standing, and you have to figure out a) why you're standing and b) what that horrible noise is.

I stumbled blearily around my room for a minute, trying to figure out how to put on flip flops and struggling to distinguish between my bathrobe and my keys (I was pretty sure one was for wearing and the other was for locking the door, but I wasn't all that clear on which was which), all the while under the relentless assault of the fire alarm.  I achieved a reasonable level of organization and shuffled down the fire escape to join a huddled gathering of similarly delighted-looking flatmates in the rain.  Facebook was promptly updated on mobile phones, and we stood around and shivered while we waited for the fire department to materialize.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I am less than impressed by the reaction time of Oxford's Finest.  The firemen took nearly a half hour to show up, and they came in carefully disorganized waves of giant men with ever-so-slightly differing job descriptions and the same clumsy questions.  One of the "early" arrivers had the nerve to issue some kind of threat about the bad things that would happen if we dared to go back inside before permission was given.  I thought that was particularly helpful at 2:30 in the morning.

It took our huddle of freezing half-asleep students about forty-five seconds to figure out what had happened to trigger the fire alarm.  Our neon-clad heroes, by contrast, stomped up and down the same stairs and asked us the same questions repeatedly for about twenty minutes before it was all over.

Their confusion was surprising, given that there was a smoking pot of charred pasta sitting on the stove in the kitchen.  They were deeply troubled by the fact that there was more smoke in the hallway than there was in the kitchen.  Well, Einstein, you took a half hour to get here, and all that time the windows in the kitchen have been, as you might observe, open.

They were so disturbed by this that they decided the fire must have occurred somewhere other than in the pot of smoking charred pasta on the stove.  Because the fire alarm itself was physically located in the hall near my door, they decided that the fire must also be in my room.  This seemed to me to be a case of confusing cause with effect, but they were thrashing around with too much enthusiasm for me to explain that the location of the fire alarm does not actually influence the location of the fire.  So I stood outside my room, in my pajamas, at 2:30 in the morning, while about seven well-meaning giant neon men clodhopped through my room in big muddy boots.

It was at this point in the proceedings, and not before, that someone thought to turn the fire alarm off.  Eventually we were given permission to re-enter the building.  The firemen continued to stomp around as we all crept back into our rooms.  I locked my door from the inside, having very little interest in any further interruptions by firemen poking their heads in to ask questions that were answered forty-five minutes ago.

Ah, dorm life.