and it would have been my fault!
Last night I finished my final paper of the semester and headed to bed at three in the morning. I was looking forward to my five hours of sleep before the petitioning extravaganza. The whole night started off badly as I drifted off to the sounds of someone violently vomiting outside of my window, and it didn't improve. At four in the morning an alarm went off in my building. I somehow incorporated it into my dream and therefore when I heard the alarm it seemed perfectly logical that, yes, this was the alarm that they were talking about and it was time for all of us to go outside. I yelled at my roommates to get up. The moved very slowly. I got out of bed with my teddy bear and discarded him in the closet as I grabbed my sweatshirt and some flipflops. Others were coming out of their rooms and filling the halls, but everything seemed entirely logical to me. It wasn't until I was halfway down the hall that I snapped out of my dreamlike state and realized that this was a fire alarm. There wasn't any evidence on my floor or in the stairwell so I wasn't too worried.
Outside was dark and cold and everyone was pissed off. As the fire department and the police checked the building I got the whole story. It turned out that one of the guys had set off a fire extinguisher in the third floor hallway which had in turn tripped the alarm. Now, messing around with fire saftey equipment is never cool, but in rez it's enough to get you evicted and to slap you with a huge fine to cover the cost of the fire department having to come. Stupid prank. So by four fifteen we knew who had pulled the prank, and we knew the building was fire-free, so we headed in.
The third floor is a mess though. The walls, floor, and doors of the hallway are all covered in the chemical dust. It also got into people's rooms by wafting under the door. Everyone is doing massive cleanups today because of a stupid drunken prank. You can actually taste the dust in the air upstairs. Everyone is coughing.
I was back in my bed by four twenty trying to get back to sleep. I'm really not pleased with how I reacted to this fire alarm situation. I've been in other fires/drills at night where I have reacted very well, but this time I just was not together. I like to think that if there was a fire I would grab the important things like my journal, my photo album, and my teddy bear, but I just left my bear in the closet to burn! And I didn't even do the simple things like testing the door handle to see if it was hot to make sure I wasn't walking into a raging inferno. Maybe I should just take the leap and every night pack a "fire safety bag" containing my important personal items just in case!