The week before last, a series of fire drills was performed around the residence halls on campus.
The alarm would go buzzing, alerting all of the students to evacuate the building according to safety policies and the housing contracts they signed. Most students ran outside.
A few, though, stayed in their rooms or inside the building, until the safety officer and resident advisers came around to take down these nonchalant youngsters who still think they can fool around with fire.
But this is not the case for everyone. Most people have common sense, and that includes running away when you hear someone screaming fire or when you hear the fire alarm on.
My safety is one of my top priorities (after academics of course). But the officers did not believe this when they knocked on my dorm room door and gave me a fire safety violation, which requires me to attend an hour-long fire safety class.
I am an international student, and I used to live in Cairo, Egypt. In Cairo, the fire alarms sound differently than they do here. Back in Cairo, a fire alarm is a loud noisy bell.
The fire alarm in my dormitory was also a loud noise, but it was a loud annoying buzzing sound, like that of a huge refrigerator buzzing late at night, or a gigantic fluorescent lamp that keeps buzzing while it’s on.
I heard the fire alarm and assumed that it was just a buzzing machine outside. The sound was not familiar to me. And there is a new dormitory being built outside my room, so I assumed the sound to be some sort of machine operating on the construction. When you assume, you make mistakes, and I definitely made a mistake.
I heard the noise, so I plugged headphones into my ears and started listening to music. A while after that, someone knocked on the door, and he asked me to get out and informed me I violated safety regulations during fire alarms. I got a letter stating I have to attend a class on fire safety in Griffis Hall.
I went there, feeling very upset that I had to hear things I already know. I expected the presentation to be very boring, and it was.
There were people of all walks of life inside the room: a girl who was in the shower when the alarm went on in her room and decided to finish her shower before getting out, another girl who was in the shower and did not hear the alarm until it was too late, someone who had headphones on listening to rock music and another guy who was sleeping and sacrificed his well-being for the sake of sleep.
Many of these guys were wrong, and a few like me are the victims of some of the bureaucratic rules that govern our world. Nonetheless, the experience was just a complete waste of time for me. They made us watch two videos about fire incidents in colleges.
Then the fire safety officer lectured for a few minutes about why they are doing this, and then we watched a long disturbing documentary that followed the lives of four fire victims for a year.
I came out of this unchanged. So my advice is if you live in the dormitory and you hear any kind of buzzing sound, get out quick. These 15 minutes you spend outside will save you from an hour-long boring class that teaches you stuff you already know.
Just pray the fire drill takes place before dark because there will be no place to go eat. Armarak closes all facilities early. Fire drills can make you hungry.
Abdallah Abu Ghazaleh is a freshman majoring in electrical engineering. He can be contacted at[email protected].