Every place that has some kind of fire alert system has a policy for what to do when that system alerts people to a fire. We start practicing this stuff as kids, in daycare or preschool or kindergarten or whatever you call your first educational experience, and continue into our adulthood. I missed a few years in there, since I was homeschooled. My mother tried to do a fire drill once, back when she was convinced that she could just have “school” happen at our house the same way it would at the local Catholic school that she would have otherwise sent us to, but it went poorly and she never tried again. We did get “fire escape ladders” to hang out our bedroom windows though, in case we needed to get out of our bedrooms and the door was blocked by fire, but I think the only one that got used was when my brother snuck out of the house using it, breaking the screen he dropped in the process. Anyway. I did fire drills in high school, in college (in various places: once while in class, thrice while in different dorms, and then yearly at the theater I worked at but that was a very different experience), at both my post-college jobs, and even at a couple apartments. They’re all basically the same, with a few important differences. In every single case, you get out of the building, attend to any people who might be on fire (to a degree), get away from the fire, wait for the all-clear signal, and then go back inside where you have to spend the rest of the day pretending your whole day has not been turned upside down by this disruption. Or, in my recent case, stare longingly at your car as it tempts you to just drive away since it’s unlikely that anyone will notice your absence.

The thing a lot of these policies have in place is that someone is responsible for knowing who was around before the alarm went off and who is missing now that everyone is outside. At my current job, all of the line managers for every team are in charge of this, which they relay up the chain to the department Vice Presidents who are supposed to go around to all of the designated collection areas (where you’re supposed to go when the fire alarm goes off, no matter where you were when it did or what part of the building you exited from) and get either the all-clear or the “someone’s missing” from the line managers. In practice, things rarely work out this neatly. Often the drill is over by the time some people get to the collection zones because they were on the opposite side of the building for a meeting or perhaps lunch. Or the line managers don’t actually know who is or isn’t around that day (my manager relies on us, his employees, to know if someone’s actually missing or just out of the office entirely since he is bad about keeping track of that (which is just one more bitter irony in my life these days, especially since I’m the one he relies on the most to know who is or isn’t genuinely missing)). While they all know who is in their department, I’m sure, I don’t think most of the line managers are entirely aware of who is or isn’t present. After all, I’ve never seen anyone tell the VP that someone was missing, even the times that an employee wound up walking up right as we were going back inside, so I’m not really sure that this policy is being followed that closely.

Which is why, as we stood at our designated collection spot, in the empty parking spot that I usually park in, I was incredibly tempted to just duck into my car. I had to walk past it to join up with my coworkers (I made a brief detour to the bathroom as the alarm went off since I needed to go more than I was afraid of any fire) and I could have easily slipped inside with them none the wiser. Plenty of other people were doing it. I likely wouldn’t have drawn any attention. But I didn’t. I walked past my car, joined up with my coworkers, and spent the entire fifteen minute ordeal thinking about just getting in my car and driving away as my coworkers talked, my boss cracked jokes, and I realized I was the only one who knew that no one was missing. It would have been so easy. It’s not like there was an actual fire, no fire trucks to dodge around should I have chosen to drive out of the parking lot. I mean, I barely made it out of bed this morning as a result of how much I wanted to just not go to work today and I had to fight that battle all over again as I stood in the sunlight and stared at my car. But then the drill ended, we all went inside, and I’m writing this up nine hours later as I kill some time between work tasks at the end of my day. Which I wouldn’t even be doing if my boss hadn’t spent the entire drill talking about this very topic and how often people don’t actually know that someone’s missing (after I told him that no one was). He had plenty of stories to tell about other times people didn’t know that someone was missing and that this lack of awareness was why the firefighters would always go check the building anyway, even if they were told that no one was missing.

It reminded me of some experiences I had at my previous job. All of our employment contracts included a clause that said, explicitly, that three consecutive days of unexcused absence would be taken as a resignation. This specific clause stood out to me when I started the job, but it would be a year before I got my first example of why it was included. My Team Leader was very much a Type-A person who met with her Team Members every week to check in with us or at least chat if there was no work stuff going on, but it turns out that she was the exception rather than the rule. Just into the start of my second year at the company, someone sent out a company-wide farewell email (it was common to send out farewell emails, but the company-wide ones were forbidden and, like this one, usually unsent by the system administrators pretty quickly) saying that they hadn’t showed up to work for an entire month without anyone noticing or saying something to them, so they were just going to leave and good luck to all of us still at this horrible company. Needless to say, the email was gone five minutes later but I’d already printed it out for posterity (I’ve unfortunately lost it since then, though). This policy came up again in my final year, when one of the developers I was “working” with, who was impossible to get ahold of and who wasn’t delivering the work he’d promised and who I could never track down, “resigned” after his boss FINALLY looked into the fact that no one had seen him in three months. Turns out he’d moved away and taken a different job, but hadn’t quit so he could keep collecting a second paycheck and his boss, despite me telling him two weeks in that no one could get ahold of this guy, didn’t look into any of this for three whole months.

So, yeah. Fire alarms have policies that almost no one knows and even fewer people follow and it turns out that it’s really easy to disappear as an employee because most people don’t actually care that much (except for my boss though, I guess, and only then on incredibly rare and specific occassions). As someone who took risks very seriously and had done theater stuff from a young age (where fire safety is VERY important, given how notorious fire deaths in theaters are), I’ve always made sure I know what the policy is (which is why I get a bouncy ball from the fire chief during my junior year of college because I was the only one who left my dorm and crossed the street when the fire alarm went off, like you’re supposed to, so you’re not in the way of the fire deparment) and it’s always been a little staggering that no one else takes this stuff even remotely seriously. It’s like they all stopped paying attention after “get out of the building and then stop, drop, and roll” in Kindergarden. Anyway, this post about being tempted to flee during a fire drill because no one really pays that much attention most of the time has gone on long enough and I’m going to leave it with a suggestion that you look up what your workplace or apartment/condo fire alarm policy is because those, like most OSHA regulations, are written in blood/ash and there’s usally a very good reason you’re doing what you’re doing, even if no one else does it or knows why.