Ring the Alarm

No, not a dancing sequel.

It’s been a week of close calls. By close I mean not close at all but the alarms didn’t know any better. Really, I think it was professional emergency drill week and our employers just didn’t want “hint” at the practice run.

Monday the fire alarms start. We’ve heard them all before. “Please walk to the nearest stairwell”. We all know what we are supposed to do in these situations, follow the automated voice. That robot coming from the walls must know more about the situation than we humans possibly could. Our elementary educations tell us to exit the building in a calm, orderly fashion.

Rewind to my favorite fire drill. Somehow my broke ass high school had a pool. Because we owned that pool, every student in the body had to swim in that pool. Or at least wade in the shallow end of that pool. Bubbles and bobs, bubbles and bobs. Wet, in a swimsuit during puberty, you would think the swim instructors would cut us a little slack with the knowledge of an incoming drill. No, never. The alarms start ringing once the suits are on and the bodies are soaked. Out of the pool we go on a November afternoon and into the parking lot in orderly fashion. Our single file line of embarrassment. Running out into the cold weather, the nipples on our half-developed breasts remain in a perpetually erect state. Sure, maybe that would have gotten the attention of the boy we were crushing on at moment. But as soon as the gaze directed itself upward, we were bound to kill any attraction our breast had inspired. Ah, the swimcap.

Freezing, embarrassed, wet, and awkward - I will never forget that fire drill.

These rehearsals have just trained us to believe that nothing is really happening. Hearing those sirens wail literally makes my body slow down. We all move in half tie and wait for the noise to stop because that’s what it always does. That is what it did on Monday at least.

Wednesday was another story. Tornado alarms filled the sky. Being hump day, I glanced at my watch to see if this was the monthly test. 2:30pm. Nope, this one is real. The second one was real too. So real for Minneapolis, the glass that makes up the skyline was getting blown to hell. The staff sat in the Music Room for a good hour and half that day waiting for the systems to blow through. I played ping-pong. This is our emergency procedure.

But I got to thinking … what if a tornado hit on the first Wednesday of the month at 1:00pm. I’m pretty sure we’d all be fucked.