Why I Hate the Fire Alarm

In my old building, the fire alarm wasn’t that irritating. It was out in the hallway, and the concrete walls and unusually thick door stopped most of the noise from penetrating. The downside? If you were asleep, it was easy to sleep right through it. Potentially fatal, but it kept us from having to stomp out of the building at 3am every time some drunk freshman decided it would be funny to pull the fire alarm.

In my current building, the actually just spent money to upgrade the system to make it MORE irritating, presumably to avoid exactly the problem I just described. There is now a speaker mounted directly above my door, which points directly at my bedroom. The alarm itself, aside from being deafeningly loud, is not just your standard garden-variety “whoop-whoop” alarm. Between the whoops, a poorly-recorded woman’s voice with an odd accent comes on and announces:

MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE! MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE! THE SIGNAL YOU HAVE JUST HEARD INDICATES THE REPORT OF A FIRE IN THIS BUILDING! PLEASE EXIT THE BUILDING AT THIS TIME AND DO NOT RE-ENTER UNTIL NOTIFIED BY THE PROPER AUTHORITIES!

The message then repeats, and then whoops some more. When you step into the hallway, it’s louder, because there are multiple speakers, and the area is smaller. Plus there are strobe lights going off. You stagger down the hall, and enter the stairwell, where there is one speaker for every floor, strobe lights, and the concrete causes it to echo. By the time you reach the ground floor, you cannot hear anything, so you gesture to the man standing in the fire alarm room, and he yells something that sounds like:

“Someone up on the third floor pulled the alarm, but it looks like there’s no fire. I guess they thought it would be a funny thing to do during finals week.”

Staggering back up the stairs, the alarm mercifully off, I observe that at least if there was ever a real fire, I wouldn’t die due to my inability to hear the alarm.

And if you think I have it bad, which you probably don’t, consider the fire department, who have to not only get out of bed, but have to get all suited up and go tearing down to the building every time some idiot pulls the alarm, because it’s tied directly to the fire department. Who knows how much each false alarm is costing us in tax dollars. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the fire truck parked outside one college housing building or another. I feel a great amount of sympathy for the downtown Portland fire department for putting up with this shit.

Someday I’m going to get out of bed and find out that the Ondine building burned to the ground because the fire department assumed it was a prank call.

I’d love to catch one of these idiots who thinks it’s fun to pull the fire alarm in the act some time. Let’s see how much damage we can do to a drunken idiot! Anyone have a baseball bat?