Tales of the Fire Drill

It's times like this that I completely understand the sentiment of, "Oh, I just can't even..." Apparently, half of my time at this job is going to be spent figuratively throwing my hands in the air in frustration at one of my coworkers. This is not the first (nor probably the last) example of why it's good I don't own a baseball bat, but it's the most recent & most baffling so far.

An e-mail went out to all the building tenants to remind everyone that each floor has to have a fire safety person. No one wants this job, but because I'm ostensibly an office admin & lowest on the totem pole, I was voluntold to do this. Not that I really care; its nice to be useful, plus you get a fancy orange vest & a modicum of responsibility.

My co-FSP thinks her boss made her do it because her boss didn't want to wear the vest. Which is ridiculous. That is the best part of being the job.

The role of the FSP is to make sure that if there is a fire or some other emergency, people get evacuated & relocated to the safe zone.

After listening to a fireman tell me what my new responsibilities are, I had to impart some of that training to everyone else on my team. I chose to do this in an e-mail because getting them all in the same room at one time is an exercise is so much futility that thinking about it is giving me a headache. I tried to keep the e-mail as short as I could because I knew no one was really going to read it.

One of the partners responded to my e-mail, CCing everyone else, by thanking me for the information & commenting that this probably means there's going to be a fire drill soon. Yep. Probably.

The day after I sent the e-mail, a different coworker asked me if "they" were going to tell me when the fire drill would be so that "we can hurry up & go down the elevator before the alarm goes off."

I get it. We're over twenty floors up. That's going to suck walking down. You know what sucks more, though? A real emergency happening & no one knowing what to do because they've never practiced before. Or there's an unexpected glitch in the evacuation plan that could have been worked out if everyone had drilled properly. That's why there are drills. But I get it; I do. She hasn't thought through the full ramifications of sneaking down the elevator. That's my job as I was the one who took the class.

What she said next, however, made me literally squint my eyes in disbelief. She then suggested that if they do tell me when the fire drill is, I should let anyone who's physically impaired know early in case they want to take an elevator down & participate in the drill.

From my e-mail to the firm:

If you are permanently or temporarily disabled, stay with your assistant outside the stairwell until most of the people have passed, then go into the stairwell & remain on the landing.
The Exception: If there is smoke, fire, or any other life-threatening event happening on our floor, GO INTO THE STAIRWELL & remain on the landing out of the way of the evacuees. The stairs are the safest places in the building.

I said to my coworker, "Oh, they definitely don't have to try to go down the stairs if it's a drill. They don't even have to go down the stairs in a real emergency. They just have to wait for the firemen to come."

To which she replied, "But I was just thinking that you should at least give the physically impaired people a heads up in case they want to participate." I reiterated again that physically impaired people do not need to go down the stairs in a drill OR in a real emergency. Her response was another variation of what she just said.

"I understand what you're saying," I replied very slowly, "but physically impaired people don't ever have to go down the stairs, so making them take the elevator down doesn't really do much for them."

"But," she said as though I was a moron, "you know, just in case they want to participate..."

At this point, I turned back to my computer & said, "Yeah, okay." Then she tried to change tack & say that I should e-mail our physically impaired coworkers if I know there's a fire drill so they know not to come in.

I think her definition of "participate" is "go to the safe area." My definition is more like "do what you would do in a real emergency." But I can only spend so much time trying to convince the unconvincable, so I suppose in the end we agreed to disagree.

We only have one person on our team who is physically impaired. Most of the time, he works from home. When he does get into the office, he gets winded & has to take a break walking from the lobby down the hall to his office. The chances of him wanting to walk the block to the safe area is slim to none & Slim just left.

The upshot is that I realized making her our physically impaired person's assistant, even though her cube is right outside his office, would be a bad idea. If she can't follow my directions, how can I trust her to not just insist he get on the elevator or something? I can't. So I asked a different coworker to be the assistant.

The kicker? The assistant doesn't have to walk down the stairs, either. So this next fire drill, if our physically impaired coworker is in the office, she gets to walk down twenty-six flights of stairs instead of hanging out on the stairwell.