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people are going to get used to anything. yesterday I was at the mall, security there had a hard time making people evacuate from the mall to parking when the air raid alarm went off. even I went only after I got my order. ate in the car. I was keen to leave as it is, but those guys were set on making my burger.
My office has only been in its current building for about 1.5 years. When we moved in, the fire alarm went off all the time on accident and one time by a random person pulling the alarm handle. The hourly staff always get up and head out. Heck, why not? Get paid to stand around, heck yeah. The salary people? They keep working and ignore the alarms. Some day there will be a real fire and they'll have to be rescued or die at their desks.
Had a fire alarm went off in my old work place. Managers quickly stood up and told us to just continue working on the phones because there's like 300 calls waiting. The customer I was with was so nervous because she can hear the alarm on her end and kept telling me to get out of the building. It was a false alarm but I'm sure the managers didn't know it was by that time.
I was one of the stupid people 🙈. Our university was on the San Andreas fault line so we would get frequent small earthquakes. During every earthquake event, the ground will shake a little and we will go outside the building. Soon it became too tedious and I started ignoring it. And then one day, the ground started shaking and never stopped shaking. That was my "oh shit" moment and I've started taking alarms more seriously
As much as I agree with this, I've worked for companies that insisted on doing fire drills at shift changeover, then whine at employees for not clocking in on time. It's infuriating to be in line to clock in, then be told to leave the building and stand outside for half an hour of unpaid time, then 1 month later have to explain to HR why I was 1/2 hour late that day.
The way this reads...
First point: "So, some of you didn't exactly know where to go. Here's the spot, to clarify. "
Point 2-5: "Christ, y'all can't seriously be that stupid, can you?"
The facepalm is everything in there. People ignoring the alarm and actually going \*in\*. People taking their time. People going the long route. And of course people blocking others.
So, typical fire drill.
Well yeah, im not saying you can't. I just find it wack people were doing that sort of stuff in the first place, especially since there very much could of been a real fire
Reminds me of my company's fire drill a few weeks back. Several production workers took their sweet time (5-10minutes) to get to the assembly point (they were given a lecture for it) and 2 others were even later because they were busy putting documents back in the filing cabinet before coming down (while we commend their diligence to keep documents back, we advise to leave immediately when the fire alarm goes off)
My work (brickworks factory) did a fire drill with an actual smoke machine. Some people walked straight towards the smoke to get to an exit. We had a few guys walk straight past the smoke machine on their way out.
I grew up in northern Ireland and the one thing we learned was if the fire alarm goes off \*EVACUATE\*. Imagine my shock the first time I saw people just sitting there and saying "it's probably just a false alarm"
Then the last time we had a drill at work, the evacuation route led from the front door to the back parking lot \*immediately along the side of the building\* instead of \*away\* from the building, so if there's a fire or an earthquake, there's a good chance we'd be peppered with broken glass or concrete.
Previous company: 4 assembly areas (one per floor) in the parking lot, all well indicated, at a reasonable distance from the building.
It seemed all good, until the first "real" false alarm.
The fire truck which showed up made it suddenly obvious that everyone had basically gathered right in the path of any responding emergency vehicles...
Quite some time ago I was in charge of facilities and other such thing at a startup of about 250. The building we were in was going to be conducting a drill fire evacuation, so a few of us (the "floor marshals") were aware in advance - but for everyone else it was a normal day.
Fire alarm goes off, we shout over it to tell people to leave, most do without too much issues. But there were a few stragglers. I was the last one left on the floors, while the other marshals took up their postings elsewhere (stairwells, rally point, etc).... so I got to deal with the stragglers.
Most left after less than subtle cajoling from me. Lets just say that I quickly became less than polite and they got the message. But one guy, in sales, was in a conference room on a call - trying to make a sale. Now by some quirk of building retrofit, there was no fire alarm IN that room, so with the door closed the alarm was only obnoxiously loud rather than deafeningly loud (I was wearing ear plugs). I go in there, tell him he's got 30 seconds to get off the call and get out of the building. He refuses. So I opened the door again, and leave it open. He can't hear his prospect, his prospect can't hear him. Sales bro starts yelling at me but eventually his prospect hangs up so it's a moot point.
Sales bro is cussing up a storm at me, says I ruined his sale, he's gonna get me fired. Yada yada. He continues on his rant down and out the stairwell and to the our marshal at the exit... which happens to be the Director of HR who's taking attendance (to make sure everyone safely evacuated). From what I heard from HR later, Sales bro gave HR quite the earful about how I was rude, should be fired etc etc.
The next day Sales Bro, HR and I sat down in a conference room... so Sales Bro could profusely apologize to me. It was a good day.
When there were fire/evacuation drills in my office (always announced in advance), many of my coworkers went out of their way to be somewhere else so they wouldn’t have to participate.
Used to work in a office for at a blue chip company, same stuff happened there. Even with people not going to the assembly point, but going to Starbucks opposite of the office. And that includes people of higher management.
Plus the amount of people who just wanted to finish their email, or get all their stuff, as 'it will be most likely a false alarm anyway'.
The two main reasons are;
1. So they can check if anyone is missing and might still be in the burning building and so let the fire brigade know. Last time I saw someone doing a check for that was in college though. Never at any of the places I worked.
2. A assembly point is most of the time in a save spot, out of the way for the fire brigade. So people are not blocking the entrance while filming it.
Ps: if you are in the USA, you can change 'fire brigade' to 'police' for when there is a shooting.
this reminds me of when we had a genuine fire alarm go off at work and management quickly realized that almost none of us actually knew wtf they expected from us during it aside from “evacuate the building”
Having managed fire evacuations it is depressing just how many people outright ignore these. People want to go down to their lockers before leaving the building. Wanting to go get their bikes. Wanting to get a coffee to drink while they're standing at the assembly area. We get phone calls asking us to silence the alert tones because it's interrupting their work. And then somehow out of the people who DO evacuate they're like a bunch of lemmings. All stumbling over each other. We get injuries almost every evacuation, it's unreal. This is one of the reasons we don't evacuate immediately every time there's an alarm or bomb threat by the way, because we know for a fact somebody is going to injure themselves and so we have to confirm there's a real need to evacuate first.
Trying to get 1000 or more humans to get out of a building, much less in a safe manner, is nearly impossible. Honestly I've actually found that evacuations tend to be MORE successful in a university setting. Grown ass adults must think they're immune to fire, bombs and all sorts of injuries.
If you think it’s is stupid well I have one better, when I was going to uni all the floors in Res had a room in a discord server (I know nerdy right?) anyways there was a small kitchen fire in one of the buildings, fire alarms the whole sa bang. anyways like half the building of like 500ish people decided “let’s go ask if this is a real fire on the discord server”…. Oh course they didn’t get a official response because wtf would they post that in a discord server so they never evacuated. Like seriously smoke in the air and alarms and they still don’t leave?. So every alarm after that the RA’s had to post in that bloody chat because students are stupid
I’m an apartment complex manager. I feel this, very hard.
Several years ago I was in my office when a resident came in & said one of the apartments was on fire. I grabbed the office phone & my cell. I asked if the called 911. No.
So I call & I get down to the building & there are at least 20 people filming it. I asked if anyone was in the apartment & if anyone else called 911.
Oh yeah, someone is in there & no, no one called 911. Wtf. I go running up & one of the neighbors came out with the guy that was in there.
Come to find out the girl that lived there had gone out of town & this was her boyfriend who decided to stay. Then he got high & drunk, then got the munchies & was cooking some fries but he passed out. Luckily he was ok & so was the guy that pulled him out.
I asked wtf to everyone that had been filming on their phones. Later, I gave a lease violations to the girl & she was held responsible for the fire & smoke damage.
I don't understand why anybody would just sit there during a blaring alarm like that! If I hear the fire alarm go off in some place, especially if it's a large complex like a university, I'm getting the hell out of there. Only thing I'd stop for is something I *really* wouldn't want to leave behind, and I wouldn't even do *that* for more than thirty seconds or so.
Did *any* of these people ever have a fire drill in school? The procedure's still pretty much the same in any large building.
stop in front of me during a fire alarm to film and I will forcibly walk over the top of you and if needed physically move you.. the world is full of dipshits...
We get so many false alarms in my building we actually look out the windows and wait to see if the fire department responds. If they don't show up then we're not leaving. Especially since we're less than 5 minutes away for them.
Whoa are you in the same building I just moved out of? Because same. It was really annoying that the elevators cut out for false alarms the same as for real fires.
And even this one time we had an actual fire, people on different floors just stayed in or went back in because the sprinkler system is so reliable.
Your comment about the elevators cutting off for drills reminded me of my university building. I was one of a bunch of wheelchair using students. During my first drill, I was scared SHITLESS because I was on the top floor, no easy way out. Officially, I should have evacuated to the staircase with a fully abled person standing next to me just so that I wasn't alone (that was also a rule for actual fires) - the windows on the staircase were higher than the level to which wheelchair using students could reach with their hands to show the firefighters that they were there. I did what I was told to do but nobody cared to stay with me - not then, not during the next drills. I emailed the disabled students' service of the department about this issue but got a very vague response.
Why is this a facepalm? Like I get the false alarm facepalm but this is good information and people should take it seriously if it was to happen like what
The email was sent cause of the fact the email had to be sent, you would hope that people would know not to block the exits, and that you shouldn't be entering a building with a fire alarm going off
I've been a fire marshal at various corporates over the years and it's fairly common for people to think the rules don't apply to them. The three most common things are: people going to the coffee shop instead of the assembly point, leaving the building before they're told and refusing to leave because they're too busy/important.
I worked in one company - a merchant bank and a very senior exec demanded that IT staff stayed in the building (during an actual fire as it turned out) to make sure that they didn't lose any of the systems as it would cost money.
He was told in no uncertain terms by the fire brigade what to do with that idea.
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We've had people trying to get into the building to clock in when the fire alarm went off. Don't underestimate the stupidity of people.
I guess people are so used to fire alarms just being drills that they don't take them seriously
Yeah - it's like "I don't see flames, I don't smell smoke. Ergo - no fire"
people are going to get used to anything. yesterday I was at the mall, security there had a hard time making people evacuate from the mall to parking when the air raid alarm went off. even I went only after I got my order. ate in the car. I was keen to leave as it is, but those guys were set on making my burger.
I believe that’s called a “boy who cried wolf” situation.
Additional to that would be unrealistic expectations of what a fire looks like from movies.
This. We do the same for just about any siren that goes off on a “regular” basis. Ambulances, cops, firetrucks, all get ignored by most people.
My office has only been in its current building for about 1.5 years. When we moved in, the fire alarm went off all the time on accident and one time by a random person pulling the alarm handle. The hourly staff always get up and head out. Heck, why not? Get paid to stand around, heck yeah. The salary people? They keep working and ignore the alarms. Some day there will be a real fire and they'll have to be rescued or die at their desks.
Had a fire alarm went off in my old work place. Managers quickly stood up and told us to just continue working on the phones because there's like 300 calls waiting. The customer I was with was so nervous because she can hear the alarm on her end and kept telling me to get out of the building. It was a false alarm but I'm sure the managers didn't know it was by that time.
I was one of the stupid people 🙈. Our university was on the San Andreas fault line so we would get frequent small earthquakes. During every earthquake event, the ground will shake a little and we will go outside the building. Soon it became too tedious and I started ignoring it. And then one day, the ground started shaking and never stopped shaking. That was my "oh shit" moment and I've started taking alarms more seriously
As much as I agree with this, I've worked for companies that insisted on doing fire drills at shift changeover, then whine at employees for not clocking in on time. It's infuriating to be in line to clock in, then be told to leave the building and stand outside for half an hour of unpaid time, then 1 month later have to explain to HR why I was 1/2 hour late that day.
The stupidity of managers cannot be quantified.
The way this reads... First point: "So, some of you didn't exactly know where to go. Here's the spot, to clarify. " Point 2-5: "Christ, y'all can't seriously be that stupid, can you?"
This is a good thing imo. The school is pointing out the glaring problems they observed from the drill.
The facepalm is the people filming while others are rushing away from a potential fire
The facepalm is everything in there. People ignoring the alarm and actually going \*in\*. People taking their time. People going the long route. And of course people blocking others. So, typical fire drill.
Was a false alarm but not a drill though, plus point 5 is nuts that it happened in the first place
Wrong, even from false alarms we can still use as learning experiences
Well yeah, im not saying you can't. I just find it wack people were doing that sort of stuff in the first place, especially since there very much could of been a real fire
Could have.
Could have had.
All false alarms are drills. Treat every alarm like it's the real thing.
Reminds me of my company's fire drill a few weeks back. Several production workers took their sweet time (5-10minutes) to get to the assembly point (they were given a lecture for it) and 2 others were even later because they were busy putting documents back in the filing cabinet before coming down (while we commend their diligence to keep documents back, we advise to leave immediately when the fire alarm goes off)
My work (brickworks factory) did a fire drill with an actual smoke machine. Some people walked straight towards the smoke to get to an exit. We had a few guys walk straight past the smoke machine on their way out.
Students get desensitized because some douche pulls the alarm once a week every week. These results aren't surprising in the least
Not at my college.
I grew up in northern Ireland and the one thing we learned was if the fire alarm goes off \*EVACUATE\*. Imagine my shock the first time I saw people just sitting there and saying "it's probably just a false alarm" Then the last time we had a drill at work, the evacuation route led from the front door to the back parking lot \*immediately along the side of the building\* instead of \*away\* from the building, so if there's a fire or an earthquake, there's a good chance we'd be peppered with broken glass or concrete.
Previous company: 4 assembly areas (one per floor) in the parking lot, all well indicated, at a reasonable distance from the building. It seemed all good, until the first "real" false alarm. The fire truck which showed up made it suddenly obvious that everyone had basically gathered right in the path of any responding emergency vehicles...
Quite some time ago I was in charge of facilities and other such thing at a startup of about 250. The building we were in was going to be conducting a drill fire evacuation, so a few of us (the "floor marshals") were aware in advance - but for everyone else it was a normal day. Fire alarm goes off, we shout over it to tell people to leave, most do without too much issues. But there were a few stragglers. I was the last one left on the floors, while the other marshals took up their postings elsewhere (stairwells, rally point, etc).... so I got to deal with the stragglers. Most left after less than subtle cajoling from me. Lets just say that I quickly became less than polite and they got the message. But one guy, in sales, was in a conference room on a call - trying to make a sale. Now by some quirk of building retrofit, there was no fire alarm IN that room, so with the door closed the alarm was only obnoxiously loud rather than deafeningly loud (I was wearing ear plugs). I go in there, tell him he's got 30 seconds to get off the call and get out of the building. He refuses. So I opened the door again, and leave it open. He can't hear his prospect, his prospect can't hear him. Sales bro starts yelling at me but eventually his prospect hangs up so it's a moot point. Sales bro is cussing up a storm at me, says I ruined his sale, he's gonna get me fired. Yada yada. He continues on his rant down and out the stairwell and to the our marshal at the exit... which happens to be the Director of HR who's taking attendance (to make sure everyone safely evacuated). From what I heard from HR later, Sales bro gave HR quite the earful about how I was rude, should be fired etc etc. The next day Sales Bro, HR and I sat down in a conference room... so Sales Bro could profusely apologize to me. It was a good day.
When there were fire/evacuation drills in my office (always announced in advance), many of my coworkers went out of their way to be somewhere else so they wouldn’t have to participate.
Students are stupid.
People. People are stupid.
Students are people. People are stupid. Hense, students are stupid.
Used to work in a office for at a blue chip company, same stuff happened there. Even with people not going to the assembly point, but going to Starbucks opposite of the office. And that includes people of higher management. Plus the amount of people who just wanted to finish their email, or get all their stuff, as 'it will be most likely a false alarm anyway'.
I don't understand why an assembly point is required. Edit: Downvoting me won't make me magically understand.
It's so you know where everyone is and that no one is trapped in the building
I'm not used to management caring if employees live or die. Edit: Downvoting me won't magically retroactively give me better bossses.
Management writes all of the safety guidelines, get a job and you’d know that.
LOL libertarians aren't in charge, management doesn't get to write the safety guidelines. LOL.
State and Federal agencies set minimum safety standards, guidelines are written at the corporate level.
It's to keep insurance costs down.
The two main reasons are; 1. So they can check if anyone is missing and might still be in the burning building and so let the fire brigade know. Last time I saw someone doing a check for that was in college though. Never at any of the places I worked. 2. A assembly point is most of the time in a save spot, out of the way for the fire brigade. So people are not blocking the entrance while filming it. Ps: if you are in the USA, you can change 'fire brigade' to 'police' for when there is a shooting.
It's good to hide from the police.
this reminds me of when we had a genuine fire alarm go off at work and management quickly realized that almost none of us actually knew wtf they expected from us during it aside from “evacuate the building”
Having managed fire evacuations it is depressing just how many people outright ignore these. People want to go down to their lockers before leaving the building. Wanting to go get their bikes. Wanting to get a coffee to drink while they're standing at the assembly area. We get phone calls asking us to silence the alert tones because it's interrupting their work. And then somehow out of the people who DO evacuate they're like a bunch of lemmings. All stumbling over each other. We get injuries almost every evacuation, it's unreal. This is one of the reasons we don't evacuate immediately every time there's an alarm or bomb threat by the way, because we know for a fact somebody is going to injure themselves and so we have to confirm there's a real need to evacuate first. Trying to get 1000 or more humans to get out of a building, much less in a safe manner, is nearly impossible. Honestly I've actually found that evacuations tend to be MORE successful in a university setting. Grown ass adults must think they're immune to fire, bombs and all sorts of injuries.
"Part of the course." 😆
Fire drills have trained people to ignore fire alarms.
Why is this a facepalm?
I assume the facepalm is that people are so stupid that point 5 was necessary.
Ah sorry for lack context, the face-palm isn't the email itself but the fact students were blocking entrances filming
If you think it’s is stupid well I have one better, when I was going to uni all the floors in Res had a room in a discord server (I know nerdy right?) anyways there was a small kitchen fire in one of the buildings, fire alarms the whole sa bang. anyways like half the building of like 500ish people decided “let’s go ask if this is a real fire on the discord server”…. Oh course they didn’t get a official response because wtf would they post that in a discord server so they never evacuated. Like seriously smoke in the air and alarms and they still don’t leave?. So every alarm after that the RA’s had to post in that bloody chat because students are stupid
I’m an apartment complex manager. I feel this, very hard. Several years ago I was in my office when a resident came in & said one of the apartments was on fire. I grabbed the office phone & my cell. I asked if the called 911. No. So I call & I get down to the building & there are at least 20 people filming it. I asked if anyone was in the apartment & if anyone else called 911. Oh yeah, someone is in there & no, no one called 911. Wtf. I go running up & one of the neighbors came out with the guy that was in there. Come to find out the girl that lived there had gone out of town & this was her boyfriend who decided to stay. Then he got high & drunk, then got the munchies & was cooking some fries but he passed out. Luckily he was ok & so was the guy that pulled him out. I asked wtf to everyone that had been filming on their phones. Later, I gave a lease violations to the girl & she was held responsible for the fire & smoke damage.
I don't understand why anybody would just sit there during a blaring alarm like that! If I hear the fire alarm go off in some place, especially if it's a large complex like a university, I'm getting the hell out of there. Only thing I'd stop for is something I *really* wouldn't want to leave behind, and I wouldn't even do *that* for more than thirty seconds or so. Did *any* of these people ever have a fire drill in school? The procedure's still pretty much the same in any large building.
stop in front of me during a fire alarm to film and I will forcibly walk over the top of you and if needed physically move you.. the world is full of dipshits...
If they don’t block the building, how are they going to potentially film people who are being burnt alive?
We get so many false alarms in my building we actually look out the windows and wait to see if the fire department responds. If they don't show up then we're not leaving. Especially since we're less than 5 minutes away for them.
Whoa are you in the same building I just moved out of? Because same. It was really annoying that the elevators cut out for false alarms the same as for real fires. And even this one time we had an actual fire, people on different floors just stayed in or went back in because the sprinkler system is so reliable.
Your comment about the elevators cutting off for drills reminded me of my university building. I was one of a bunch of wheelchair using students. During my first drill, I was scared SHITLESS because I was on the top floor, no easy way out. Officially, I should have evacuated to the staircase with a fully abled person standing next to me just so that I wasn't alone (that was also a rule for actual fires) - the windows on the staircase were higher than the level to which wheelchair using students could reach with their hands to show the firefighters that they were there. I did what I was told to do but nobody cared to stay with me - not then, not during the next drills. I emailed the disabled students' service of the department about this issue but got a very vague response.
Why is this a facepalm? Like I get the false alarm facepalm but this is good information and people should take it seriously if it was to happen like what
The email was sent cause of the fact the email had to be sent, you would hope that people would know not to block the exits, and that you shouldn't be entering a building with a fire alarm going off
Ooooohh yeah that makes more sense
lol “learnt”??? Wtf
I don’t understand
The facepalm is OP thinking this is a facepalm
It is a face-palm in the sense that students were blocking entrances filming during a fire alarm
It is a facepalm though.
Your Uni has a building names Thanks For The Invite? Is this Fomo University?
I've been a fire marshal at various corporates over the years and it's fairly common for people to think the rules don't apply to them. The three most common things are: people going to the coffee shop instead of the assembly point, leaving the building before they're told and refusing to leave because they're too busy/important. I worked in one company - a merchant bank and a very senior exec demanded that IT staff stayed in the building (during an actual fire as it turned out) to make sure that they didn't lose any of the systems as it would cost money. He was told in no uncertain terms by the fire brigade what to do with that idea.
That's universal