Earlier this week, my senior citizen program sent out an email saying there was going to be a fire drill on the 10th at 10:00, and if we wanted to miss it, we should arrive late for our 10:00 class.

When the alarm went off (as announced) yesterday, all the old people stood up and started talking. Some of them went out into the hall. One guy propped the fire stair door open performatively and tried to tell people not to leave. “You don’t have to go down!!” he yelled at me. I passed him anyway, and went down the stairs, five flights, and out the fire door in the side of the building, because the hell with all of them.

As I was exiting, a piece of cardboard fell down where someone had kept the fire door from locking at some point.

I stood outside with about four people, all of whom who were arriving late. We were the only ones on the sidewalk. There was a small crowd in the foyer of the building, standing around and gabbing.

One of people out there with me told me she used to work near the World Trade Center when 9/11 happened, and New York City got very fierce about fire drills after that.

My husband used to burn incense in his study, and one day he tipped what he thought were dead ashes into his waste-basket. The ashes weren’t completely dead, and the papers caught fire eventually. The wall was thoroughly scorched within a few minutes, less than five, until my husband noticed and we poured water on it. The room would have gone up in another five minutes. The house would have been terribly damaged in twenty minutes.

My students used to ask why I took fire drills so seriously; clearly I was frightening them when I stood up the moment the alarm went off, grabbed my attendance sheet, made them line up, and marched them out the exit door in complete silence whether they had their jackets on or not. I didn’t mind that they were frightened. I wanted them to be frightened when a fire alarm went off.

I do understand why they didn’t want all us old people to traipse down five flights of floors on a chilly February day. I really do. But I would rather they had a plan for getting all those old people out of the building efficiently, and procedures that everyone has to follow. Actually, I would rather they put us on the second floor instead of the fifth.

If we had a real fire, I might be the only one who survived, assuming I could once again get past that loud guy trying to keep people from going down the stairs.

I would like to know, as a separate issue, why someone put cardboard in the crack of the fire door, but that’s not my problem.