The Bookless Club: Any fire alarm stories to share?

It’s not often you see a man in a wet bathing suit on a sidewalk. Especially if it’s nighttime.

And November.

But he’s not alone. There’s a barefoot young girl with two towels draped over her wet body.

Around these two are other people in various states of undress and disruption. The parking lot lights illuminate mildly perplexed faces. Clearly, they have been interrupted in the middle of something. Tennis attire. Gym clothes. Hockey players with guards on their skates. People have been doing what people do in their off-time. The clear consensus is that this interruption is an inconvenience. The one thing the group shares is the sense of festival created by this odd development.

You see, the fire alarm went off.

As a group — with the exception of the people in wet bathing suits — we responded pretty poorly.

There was no orderly dash to the exits. Could this be real? Surely this was a false alarm? There was no smoke, no flame, no sense of urgency, just the deafening tolling of the fire alarm bells.

I was in a study space, working on this column. There were three other people in the room. Had it not been for the clanging of the alarms, we would have never spoken to one another. But there it was: the vociferous pealing of a striker on a metal gong on the wall.

“False alarm”, pronounced the young man opposite me. “It happened earlier this evening.”

The girl — a university student? — asked me what we should do.

It’s impossible to type with fingers in both ears, so I volunteered to check with the front desk.

That’s when I saw the firefighters in the hallway. Four of them with ropes, axes and those metal hats that firefighters wear.

I refrained from asking them, “So, is this serious?” The subtext being “Should I use my own shallow judgment or rely upon a sophisticated, costly, integrated system for protecting life and limb?” Realizing that the last thing you want is to appear non-compliant to first responders, I simply pivoted and headed back to relay the information: The fire truck is here.

That’s when we headed for the parking lot.

As I sat on a bench taking in the sudden bonhomie of the group, I recalled other fire alarm situations I’ve experienced.

There was the one I foolishly monitored from my apartment balcony. The street might be filled with pyjama-clad people, but I’d just lathered up my legs with Nair depilatory foam and would have had to hose it all off if I evacuated. I was in my 20s. Vanity ruled. Vanity, as well as stupidity.

Years later in Key West, Florida, the hotel fire alarm went off in the middle of the night. I bundled up the kids and we spent the balance of the night on chaise lounges around the hotel pool. The following week, we were yet again evacuated in the middle of the night, but from a different hotel room. My momentary suspicion that the kids were playing with matches was quelled when the firefighters sourced the problem to the boiler room. But in both cases the events hardly registered. Fire alarm? Meh!

I often wonder if it’s a modern thing, this inability to recognize danger, even when clearly identified. The woman I am today, however, would have hosed off that Nair and joined the pyjama-clad on the sidewalk, lickety-split.