please remain calm

Thinking about the ‘escape’ theme for Illustration Friday last week reminded me of our last fire alarm at work.

We pried our boss from his email as the alarm rang out across the building. We each checked one another were there, did a quick headcount and hurried in an orderly fashion out the door, down the hallway, into the fire escape, and STOPPED!

We didn’t get more than 5 steps down before being blocked by a wall of elderly bridge players trepidaciously negotiating the stairs. In a fatal design flaw, a bridge (card playing) club occupies the entire first floor of our twelve storey office building, and shares the same fire escape as the other 11 floors.

Two by two they ambled into the stairwell from the floor below us. Clinging onto each other and then handrails on either side, they formed a fragile yet impenetrable cobweb of elderly limbs across the width of the passageway. Now, these are the folk who either zoom into the lifts on their ride on buggies nearly running you down in the process, or inch their way in bit by bit on their zimmer frames, or a best, block the lift doorway from anyone else getting in before the doors close as they hunch over the buttons squinting to find their floor. So, all things considering, they were having immense trouble with the stairs. (Its probably lucky they weren’t on the top floor).

The fire escape quickly filled like a silo of grain, with people pouring into the stairwell from the other 11 floors, and stopping in their tracks. What made it worse was that much like clowns in a mini, the old folk kept on coming! There must have been 300 of them in there, and just when you thought you’d seen the last one, the door would spring back open and another endless stream of them would start up.

Assuming it was a false alarm or drill, everyone remained calm and quite well spirited. There were various muffled giggles from the spiral of people above, and before too long the jokes started:

“Why don’t we each pick one up and run down the stairs”
“How many of them are in there?”
“Shouldn’t they have their own escape hatch, like a firemans pole”
“…or a spiral slippery-dip like at a playground”
“…or one of those inflatable slides they have on planes”
“I’m going back to work”
And even an anonymous panicked “They’re old, they’ve had their life, let us live!”

Eventually the bridge playing battalion made their way out and the rest of us followed. By now (some 12-15 mins later) all sense of urgency was lost – we ignored our meeting points at the designated assembly areas and nicked off to a café.

We found out later on our return, that there had actually been a fire in one of the upper floors of the building. After the shock and mortified silence had passed we decided next time to take the evacuation into our own hands: unravel all our socks, knit the thread into a rope ladder and each climb out the window – which would likely be a much quicker means of escape!