March 18, 2009

• Excitement yesterday

  I work in a high-rise building in Chicago.  They are doing construction in the building, converting the lower floors to a luxury hotel (with a 20,000 sq. ft. spa!  woot!)  They’ve been working on the stairwells and told us that they would be closing some of them, but to expect a fire drill sometime soon.

  Sitting at my desk yesterday, I heard a siren and it seemed to stop just below my window (I’m on the 15th floor).  I had a fleeting thought that there might be a problem at “The Rookery” building or at the Chicago Board of Trade (both are very close to me.)  And I went back to work (or my Xanga entry, whatever.)

  About a minute later, the fire alarm went off and I had already forgotten the siren and my first thought was “this is the fire drill they were talking about.”  They grade us on our response and one rule is to leave everything behind, so I set my purse on the floor under my desk, grabbed my jacket (it was a warm day, but still a little chilly at 9:30 am).  As I was walking into the stairwell, they came over the fire alarm system “If you find yourself in a dangerous situation, please call 911 and notify us of your location.”  I thought that was unusual, and realized immediately that this was not a drill, but the real thing.

  I walked down 15 flights of stairs (and am feeling it today!).  At one point, the stairwell was dark and I misjudged the bottom step (I was second from the bottom) and toppled over.  I didn’t get hurt, but did cause some alarm to the people around me. As I continued down the stairwell, I kept thinking to myself how calm I was, and how calm everyone else was, and whether or not I was the only one who thought this wasn’t a drill.

  

  I got outside and a few minutes later our floor “captains” came out and said that just before they got into the stairwell after securing our floor, they came over the fire alarm system and said “This is not a drill.  This is an emergency evacuation.”  (You couldn’t hear the system in the stairwells so none of us heard it.)  I said “Damn, had I known, I would have brought my purse, because I have no money, and no Starbuck’s card.”  Two people volunteered to give me my java fix  

  I went over to the Starbucks across the street, and it was THEN I got weak in the knees and started shaking (newspaper accounts said there were more than a dozen fire trucks around our building) and pictured the towers of 9/11.

  It turned out there was a fire on the floor right below mine.  They got it out and we were back in the building two hours later.

  • 3:09 pm
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