"I think I'll blog on my post..."

And so my day has been. The title of this post is what I said to my wife. It's been a hard day...

Anyway, the post that I wanted to blog (did you know blog is a verb? -- if it isn't, it should be) about is the excitement at work today. We had a fire drill!

Somewhere around 3:00pm, alarms started beeping. At first, I thought the power had gone out and it was all the UPSes in the office going off... but NO! It was the FIRE ALARM! AGGGHHH!! FIRE! Okay, maybe not a fire, but the alarm was going off.

So first thing, let's get everybody out of the office. While the announcement went around that, yes, it's probably a false alarm, but let's get everyone out, I went downstairs to see what caused it... and probably lost more of my hearing in the stairwell than at a rock concert.

Finally, I found one of the construction guys looking a little sheepish, so I went over and asked him if he knew what was going on. Turns out he was testing the fire suppression system for a new office, and thought building maintenance had set the alarms system to test mode, but apparently (or is that obviously?) they had not.

So while we waited for building maintenance to reset the alarm, we all mulled around outside. In those few minutes, I found out a few things about people.

1. I know who I'm not going to be with in a real emergency, since she decided she needed to take the elevator down from the third to the first floor.

2. A number of people took their prized possessions down with them. Around the parking lot I saw things like a bike, purses, a camera, a soda. Interesting.

3. Our network admin headed for the server room and got the fire extinguisher out, just in case.

4. My car pool companion decided that he better grab his keys, his wallet, and his wireless phone. Everything he'd need for when we leave work... an hour later. He was just being prepared. He even turned his computer off.

I guess we really should come up with an emergency evacuation procedure, so in the event of a real emergency people don't take the elevator, or stay behind to defend the servers, or rescue their Captain Kirk lifesize cutout (yes, we have one in the office).