text and subtext

[cellio]

Message from landlord: "In accordance with city ordinance blah blah, we will be conducting a mandatory evacuation drill on $date at 10AM."

Implied message from landlord: "Unless you particularly want to walk down 43 flights of stairs, that might be a good day to make other plans."

Unknown: whether the latter was intended -- fewer people in the building means fewer people who can mess up a compliance-check, after all. Though this would have been more plausible if they'd called it for 8AM rather than 10.

On a tangent, I wonder how people with mobility impairments get out of office buildings during alarms. There's no job-related reason I couldn't have a coworker in a wheelchair, after all, so somebody must have thought this through. (Please let somebody have thought that through...) Do they keep an elevator in service in that case (even though elevators are normally disabled during fire alarms), or is the floor warden responsible for rounding up people to carry the person downstairs, or what?

Comments

[fauxklore]

Don't you have an evacuation chair? It's a kind of stretcher / chair thing that slides down the bannisters. We've had those available in every building over 2 stories that I've worked in.

By the way, in my current building, the fire alarms only disable elevator service to the floor the fire is allegedly on and the floors immediately above and below that one.

[cellio]

Interesting. I've never heard of those. It is of course possible that I would have heard of them if I'd ever had a coworker in a wheelchair, and it's possible we do in fact have one. I've only been there a few months and we're in temporary space (one of those "rent out offices individually from somebody who rents out the whole floor" deals, where they provide infrastructure), so maybe they're on the hook for that?

With the elevators, so the idea is that an elevator can freely pass through a floor that's on fire but just can't open there? I guess they can be made fire-resistant enough for that; I hadn't thought about that. I've never, fortunately, been in an actual fire, and for the drills they disable the elevators everywhere, in my experience. This'll be my first time for one in this particular building. (Unless I develop other plans for that morning. We're floor 43 of 45, so we'll be at the back of a crowd -- so walking down the stairs probably wouldn't be good exercise because it'll be slow.)