Fire Drills and Sprinklers

Everyday, I go outside for lunch, and can usually manage to drag one or two teachers outside with me.  It is hot, but we sit under a pavilion, so at least we are in the shade.  And it's worth it because this hour at lunchtime is the only time in our lives we get to see any green.  The University has a women's campus and a men's campus and the women's campus is separated from the men's side by a 20 foot wall.  On our side, we have a few patches of grass and some trees lining a few of the walkways.  It is better than nothing.  Of course, to grow all of this fabulous greenery, they need to water it daily.  At the end of last week, something was wrong with the sprinkler system and in a matter of days the grass went from luscious and green to completely dead.   They must have fixed it over the weekend because the grass is already back to normal.  While they were at it, they must have changed the time of day when the sprinklers go off, because today when we came outside for lunch, the sprinklers were on.  It seems wasteful to water the grass during the hottest part of the day, but I didn't mind.  I purposefully walked through the bit that was spraying a little on the sidewalk just to feel the spray of it.    All through lunch I watched the birds coming down, and splashing around in some of the puddles.  The longer I watched the more I thought about running through the sprinklers as a child, and all those afternoons where we got out the slip and slid... "You run, you jump, you hit the bump and take a dive."  (They just don't make kids toy jingles the way they use to do they?)  Anyway, we were out there for about a half hour when I finally couldn't take it anymore.  I took my shoes off, hiked up my floor length skirt, and ran through the sprinklers.  It was fantastic.  I did cartwheels and splashed in the puddles, and even convinced one of the other teachers to join me.  It was great.  We made complete fools of ourselves. Luckily, we were the only ones outside to see it since its too hot for everyone else.  I can't seem to help myself.  There is something about being under the thumb of so many rules that makes me want to revert to childhood.  I keep finding myself acting childishly and rebelling in a lot of really minor ways, like, running through the sprinklers when no one is looking.

We stayed outside for another 15 minutes or so, enough time to go from soaked to completely dry, and then headed back inside to our frozen cubicles and another two hours of thumb twiddling before we could go home to more thumb twiddling in our apartments.  Today though, turned out to be something a little different.  At about 2:20 the fire alarm sounded.  At first no one even seemed to notice it.  To be honest, I thought it was someone messing with the bell they sometimes ring to announce the start of exams.  Someone called out from her cubicle, "Are they testing the alarms again?" and no one said anything for a while, then someone on the other side of the office said, "Actually guys, I think I smell something burning... this might be for real."  There was a little more discussion, and then we got the announcement that it was, in fact, for real.  

Suddenly everyone was panicking and looking for their abayas and head scarfs and grabbing purses and other things. The area in the corner that I have been calling my home while waiting for a cubicle is in the very very back, so I so I was one of the last to exit the office.  When I got to the lobby area, everyone was standing around waiting to fingerprint out.  Now, to fully understand this, you have to understand that the machine we use to clock in and out with is mounted on the wall, inside a glassed in booth in the corner near the elevators.  Everyday when we come in, there is a line to clock in, and everyday starting at 2:50, a line of women waits for the clock to strike 3pm when we can finally start to go one at a time into the booth, put our finger on the little glass pad, and have a computerized voice tell us "Please try again" a minimum of 2 times before finally telling us "Thank You" and recording our hours, at which point we can exit the booth and let the next person in line come through and repeat the process. Obviously, this takes forever.  I couldn't believe that with the fire alarm still going off, we were really going to stand here and take turns clocking out.  

But the most surprising thing was, no one seemed to be in any particular hurry.  In fact, there wasn't even anyone in the booth fingerprinting out.  Everyone was crowded around the outside of it trying to decide what to do....."Should we clock out?"  "It isn't 3 yet?"  "But we probably won't be coming back in if we leave because it's already 2:30?"  "So should we clock out or not?"   I suggested we not worry about fingerprinting at all and just leave the building the quickest way possible.  As obvious as this seemed to me, it was apparently a novel idea to most.  "you mean, don't fingerprint out at all?"  "yes," I said, "it's an emergency after all."  "yeah, but we can't just leave...."  Thankfully, at that point Chris, or supervisor took charge and told us all to clock out, so that is what we did.  We each took the time to fingerprint ourselves and then walk down the stairs to the front lobby all while the alarm kept going off around us.  

When we got to the front lobby we faced another dilemma.  No one wanted to go outside.  It was very hot out there, and some women had forgotten to grab their head scarves in all of the confusion and were afraid to go out and be seen without being covered.  So we sat in the lobby of a potentially burning building, waiting for 3pm to come and our drivers to show up to take us away.  If there had been a real emergency, I'm pretty sure we all would have died.  As it turned out, apparently, there was a small emergency, just not a fire.  It did however require technicians who happened to be male.  Since it couldn't wait until we had left the building at 3pm, they pulled the fire alarm just to get all the women to leave so the maintenance men could come in and fix it. I can see where that might have seemed like an efficient strategy to someone.  However, they obviously didn't take into account the length of time needed for a group of women to dress, get ready, discuss the situation, decide on a plan of action, and then finally act on it.