Betting on the False Alarm

The other night as I was readying myself for slumber, my apartment building's fire alarm began to blare.  I begrudgingly got dressed, grabbed some pocket essentials, and hit the stairs down to the lobby just as firefighters were arriving. In the end, it was a false alarm. A shitty prank, but I'll take a prank over all my belongings going up in smoke any day.

So what's the point? These things happen all the time.

I bring this up because while I waited outside for the alarms to be shut off, I noticed that there was about 20 people waiting with me. That's what I found most alarming.

First of all, my apartment building is huge. If I calculate the number of floors, the number of apartments per floor, and estimate only 2 people living in each one (which is generously low), I estimate over 500 residents in this building.

Okay, but not everyone will be home all the time.

Oh, absolutely. It was after midnight on a friday so let's be crazy and say that HALF of everyone living in the building was out socializing. And of course, some people may be working night shifts, or travelling out of town, or running to the store for condoms and lotto tickets, so let's cut that number in HALF again and pretend all those people were also not at home.

So where does that leave us? Well, aside from the 20 people who exited the building, that still leaves OVER 100 PEOPLE who sat in their apartment and waited out 30 minutes of deafening alarms because ... what? They had a hunch that there wasn't really a fire?

I admit that I didn't really believe there was a fire either, but why take that chance? It's fire alarm procedure to exit the building anyway. So does this mean that a quarter of the residents are deaf? Or just lazy? Did dozens of people figure, well, I already put the kids to bed, I don't want to be bothered with all the coats and shoes it's going to take to maybe save their lives.

That's another thing. Of the few people I saw that night ... no kids. And I know there are tons of children living here, I see them all the time. I just can't wrap my head around it.

I don't know. Maybe my math is all wrong. Maybe a vast number of the apartments only have one resident and they like to go out and party hard. Maybe all the families here have fathers who work late and mothers who take the kids to see grandma on the weekends. Maybe numerous residents are confined to their home because they're morbidly obese and wear fire-retardent pajamas.

Or maybe ... a lot of people are fucking dumb.