Alarms

This morning a fire alarm went off in the middle of my water aerobics class. We had to get out of the pool but, fortunately, they let us stand by the back door. Glad to not have to go outside in a wet suit on a balmy Chicago Spring day (translation: rainy, cloudy, in the 40's) and glad that it was just the result of someone's unfortunately cooking in the Senior Center wing of the building.

This rare experience made me think of other alarms. Recently I was in the Newark airport when an astoundingly loud alarm blared for fifteen minutes. The bizarre thing was that no one did anything---the gate agents continued their work, the restaurant employees kept on serving food, the cleaners continued cleaning. We never were told what had happened.

Back in the 70's bomb threats were common in schools. The first time it happened at Chippewa we emptied the school very quickly and, while we stood outside far from the building, the police came and went through every locker and nook and cranny in the school. It was scary. With each succeeding threat we became more blasé because we knew that, as we stood outside, the secretary had already recognized the voice of the student who had called in the alarm while he was home "sick".

Some tornado alarms have been frightening. The most recent happened when Northbrook experienced a "micro-burst". The final bell had just rung, some kids were exiting the building, some were at their lockers, some were getting on the bus, parents were waiting in cars in front of the building, and a team from another school had just arrived for a game. No neat lines of students grouped by class on the lower level happened, but all the adults present did get everyone to the lower level until the storm passed and we were able to go outside and see all the damage nature had wrought.

The micro-burst was a real threat and, fortunately, the only real threat I remember experiencing.
Post 9/11 we were hearing daily about the color of the threat level. Our local fire department had a color coded threat flag hanging below the American flag and every day my stomach would tense a bit as I saw the yellow or orange flag flying. On the way home from aerobics today, I noticed that those flags are no longer flying. Now if they can only stop those inane threat announcements at O'Hare which tell you to put your liquids in quart sized plastic bags AFTER you have gone through security.

We are now getting media alarm messages about the Swine Flu. I poo-pooed the media frenzy until this morning's paper announced that a school in Chicago is closed because of the disease.

Obviously, we can't live without alarms. If there had been a real fire in the pool area, we would have gladly gone outside in spite of the weather. That would be a real threat that we could do something about. We are so inundated, however, by alarms about things we really have no control over that we begin to ignore all alarms just as people at the Newark airport totally ignored that awful alarm last month....and that is alarming!