Sound The Alarm

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is fire alarms.

Okay that's not strictly true, I like fire alarms, they save lives. I know that from The Sims. Along with valuable life lessons like, microwaves do sometimes just explode, teleportation is a viable alternative to staircases, and you should never swim in a pool that doesn't have a ladder.

But on Thursday morning, at about 8 o'clock, I'd literally just stepped out of the shower when the fire alarm went off. I grabbed some clothes and went and stood outside in the cold, dripping soapy water onto my feet. Wait, onto my feet? Of course, I'd forgotten shoes. And the ground was absolutely freezing. As you can imagine, I was not happy. I was tired and wet and cold. I looked up and saw a man looking at my feet and smiling. Who the fuck smiles at 8am?! "Do not say anything about my feet," I said. To myself. In my head. "Your feet must be cold," he said. To me. At 8am. Smiling. I replied "yep." I didn't feel it was necessary to say any more to this clearly-very-fucking-observant-shoe-wearing man. Of course my feet were cold, the last thing I wanted was for someone wearing shoes to point it out, while smiling at 8am. That smile ruined any potential sympathy this man intended. It felt like:

My flatmate then told me that all the buildings were having fire drills this week. "At least we've got ours out of the way then," I dripped.

"Actually..." said a voice. I looked up. It was the smiling man again. "This isn't a drill. There's no fire, but you're still going to have to do a separate drill," smiled the man.

Just when I thought I couldn't hate the smiling shoed cunt more.

Later that day I was waiting to go into a lecture, thinking "at least there'll be no more fire alarms today. Nope, no chance of any more today! I'm so glad there won't be any more fire alarms today." Then I saw two men in fluorescent jackets walk over to the fire alarm. "Do not press that fire alarm," I thought. They pressed the fire alarm. Even though I'd specifically thought them not to. To make matters worse, one of these men was the smiley-shoe man. I only saw his back so I can't prove that, and he was a different height and shape and had different coloured hair, but it had to be. I hate him. We had to leave the building, and the men were saying things like, "hurry up! Come on now! Fire alarm!" Of course there's a fucking fire alarm, I just watched you set it off!

As I slept that night I dreamt "at least that's all the fire alarms there can be! There won't be any more, no way. Not in a million years will there be another fire alarm." Guess what woke me up? That's right, a bear. Not really, it was a fire alarm you idiots! It was our drill, which I'd forgotten about, and it was 6am. Why did we need to do a drill?! We'd done exactly the same thing a day before! I reasoned, "maybe procedure has changed since then." It hadn't. It was still: Step 1 - Walk out of the building. End of procedure. To make things worse, I was hungover, so loud noises hurt. A fire alarm is pretty much as loud as they get. Apart from Joe Medforth. (Please keep reading my blog Joe.) I'd remembered my shoes this time, so I looked around smugly, hoping to see the smiley twat. Of course he wasn't there. The one time I wanted to see him and he wasn't there. He was probably out telling homeless people that they looked thin.

Then we had a "safety talk", which consisted of a man shouting that if the alarm sounds then we should remain calm and gather our possessions before exiting the building, which seems completely counter-intuitive, as well as being the complete opposite of what I was always taught. I then went back to bed, singing a song I'd made, the lyrics to which went: "No more fire alarms, la la la, there won't be more alarms, la la la la la la la la." (Soon available on iTunes.) As I drifted off I could still hear the faint sound of fire alarms, as if the noise had been engrained in my subconscious. But no, actually what I was hearing was real fire alarms, as nearby buildings had their drills. So that kept me awake until my alarm clock went off, at which point I was so confused that I remained calm and gathered my possessions before exiting the building.

I've decided now that burning to death is favourable to any more fucking fire alarm procedure. In fact I'm about to set off a firework indoors, as I learnt from The Sims. I've also deleted my door. So I'll leave you with the Thievery Corporation song that this blog is named after.