In the line of fire

The only thing about gloating about a new office like this is when there is a fire drill, or worse a fire, you have to climb down 16 flights of stairs. The positive side, of course, is that it's a drill and not a fire and no one is really going to trample on you in a bid to get out of the building. And most importantly, you're taking the stairs down and not up.

The weirdest thing, however, was that not a lot of people seemed to be taking it seriously. The building management told everyone the exact time of the drill, which meant that certain people (who would prefer to get cooked in an office fire to taking 16 flights of stairs down) happily took the lift down 5 minutes before the drill. So when the alarm rang and the lifts shut down, these people were already downstairs. The worst thing is my boss actually took half of my team with her in the lift! Obviously, if the boss' boss is saying so, it must be okay. My team members did feel guilty though and sent me an sms later to tell me they were gone, and I was tempted to tell them that as a penalty, they would just have to climb up the stairs back into the office. However, true to my geeky nature when it comes to things like this, I remembered that during a real fire, people do not (and should not) pause to send silly sms messages to their teams.

However, I was happy to see that there were a handful of us still in the office when the actual alarm went off. Even the fact that two of the handful were fire wardens who HAD to take the stairs down did not shake my faith in the human spirit. There we were, for lack of a better adjective, the fiery folks (also known as 'The Fools' in many groups of homo sapiens), who were willing to go down the road not taken.

As we headed for the stairs, one of them said to me, "Sayesha, you're in heels!" Everyone in the company had turned up in running shoes like they were going for the vertical (downward) marathon or something.

"Yes. I am." I grinned. "If this were indeed a real fire, I would be more likely to be wearing heels, isn't it? I am trying to make the drill as close as possible to reality." I got some polite smiles, which translated in my head went something like "Sheesh! Geek!" As for the others, ahem, let's just say that several heads shook themselves at me in perfect unison.

The walk down the 16 flights took us not more than 5 minutes, mainly because we were the only conscientious people in the stairway - everyone else had already taken the lift. It was no wonder that the narrow stairway of such a giantass building was not crowded during a fire drill.

So we went downstairs and joined our other colleagues in the open field besides the building for attendance. After they had stopped complaining about the hot sun, they turned to us.

"You guys actually look the stairs??" they asked us.

"Of course. We didn't cheat. Like some people." I looked at my boss. She grinned. Others just shook their heads at us. Now that I think about it, we got a lot of heads shaken at us today. Some even sported dirty looks.

But the dirtiest looks were invited by this American guy who, after the drill, got into the lift, smiled at everyone and said, "Oh this was fun! We should do it again sometime!"