An ode to the pyro who lives in my building

No, this has nothing to do with Team Fortress 2, fun though that game is. Rather, it has to do with the rat bastard who set off the fire alarm twice last week (the second time was technically this morning). No, I don't know if it was the same person both times and frankly I don't care.

See, prior to this year, I got caught in one, maybe two fire alarms in my entire college career. So that's two, max, in three years. Then this year, there was a drill early on. That annoyed me, because I'm now less likely to take all subsequent alarms seriously - after all, maybe the hall director just wants to get his rocks off looking at the kids who just got out of the shower when the alarm went off. I assume that's what a fire drill in college means, because we had to put up with the damn things all throughout grade and high school, so if we don't know to leave the building when the klaxon starts blaring, then frankly we're too dumb to live.

There was another fire alarm last semester that went off as I was playing guitar. I'll chalk that one up to my smokin' guitar solo, but still.

And now there have been two in the past week. What is this? Does someone have a bad microwave and is always burning their popcorn? That I could almost forgive. Is someone smoking weed? That I can't forgive.

I hate fire drills. I'll be up front about that. Whenever the fire alarm goes off, I take the three extra seconds to fish my key out of my pocket and lock my door. That's because I've got 2 guitars, an amp, 2 computers and a printer in my room, none of which is bolted down or particularly hard to carry. The reason I take the time to lock my door is that I never believe there's really a fire, and I don't want to come back to my room and find that some of my stuff has been stolen. Burned, I'm strangely fine with - rather than, say, unplug my better laptop and carry it out, as one girl did last night, I'll leave it in my room. That's the paradox. Every time I take those three extra seconds to lock my door, I'm saying "no, I don't think this is real. I'm risking letting all that stuff burn, plus giving myself slightly less of a chance to escape, precisely because I don't believe there's a fire."

Is that stupid? Eh. If I saw/smelled smoke, I probably wouldn't bother. After all, I don't want the firefighters to have to waste precious time hacking down my door in order to save my stuff. It's just that this building is made of brick, and was supposedly designed to be riotproof.

So congratulations, Mr/Ms Pyro. You, along with the morons at my previous schools (who unlike you might have actually had good intentions) have made me completely jaded to the notion of a fire alarm. If there's ever a real fire and someone doesn't take it seriously and gets burned for it, you'll bear some of the blame.