Ring the alarm!

I remember being in grade school and having fire drills. Those were the days when you were almost sad for a drill, because it meant that you had to leave your coloring page, or your book or your science movie. But you obediently walked outside silently in your single-file line and waited while your teacher took the roll and made sure that no one was left in the bathroom. Then, when your teachers said okay, you diligently walked back into the classroom and began your activities again.

High school is a different story. You love fire drills, look forward to them, even. You try to weasel it out of the teachers when the next planned drill will be taking place. Fire drills are the best, especially during an extremely long and tedious lecture on the coefficient of friction during a double AP Physics day. Or even better, during a day with a shortened schedule, so you end up with only 10 minutes of Honors Spanish, but you still have a 35 minute lunch. And these fire drills are no longer silent. You grab a large group of friends, meander down the stairs and out to the sidewalk and have a chat while the teacher tries to take a head count of all the kids in the class. Unfortunately for the teacher, their kids are spread out all over the sidewalk. Then, when the okay comes, you walk S...L...O...W...L...Y... back into class, dragging out this wonderful twist of fate and using it to its fullest potential.

And now, there's college fire drills. These are extremely different, mainly because they happen in your living quarters, not your classroom. We have had alarms during the fall; quite a few, actually, and they have usually been on weekends around midnight or two o'clock. These drills, as far as I know, are not planned and come about from people pulling the fire alarms. So there will unexpectedly be an alarm, and everyone will have to exit the building and wait for the okay from an RA to enter once again. Normally, this isn't that big of a deal. Unless it's the middle of the night, let's say around 4:30 am, in the middle of winter, let's say potentially January 24, with the temperature well below zero, let's say approximately 5 below zero. And you've been woken up from a very deep slumber. You have to try to figure out what the heck that annoying alarm is, jump out of bed, put on enough clothes to keep you from freezing, and get your butt out of the building. The bad thing is, you never know how long you'll be outside for! In high school, you can count on less than 5 minutes each time; but here, any guess is a good guess.Then you have to go back inside and shed off the many layers you hastily assembled into and try to go back to bed, all the while thinking that you have to get up in four hours to work on a research presentation due in two days. Needless to say, fire alarms are not high on the "Things I Can't Live Without" list.

Gotta love J-Term!
Always,
Allison