Urgent Cynicism

As I left, a few scattered employees stood around… a couple of kids on the second floor gabbed while folding towels, with flip irritation in each’s tone of voice about how rude the firefighters were. On the first floor a gathering of rent-a-cop security guards stand in a huddle, all joking around and nervously laughing about the whole thing and how silly it was that just a dumb sauna-malfunction set the alarm off.

An employee nearby the counter talks on their cell-phone about how nobody had a clue about how to handle the situation, and it’s mentioned that while on one hand the person is feeling somewhat upset for having just been admonished by the fireman, the person is also irritated that they weren’t just *nicer*. Well for fucks-sake, it was I guess supposed to be an emergency…???

I was so proud of myself for having met 3 key milestones tonite: a) Leave work on time, b) run home to quickly address 2 major housekeeping chores earmarked for tonite, and c) go to the gym… no sitting down and chilllin’ once home.

Woohoo, I’d done it!

I was on the treadmill, the cable TV was rolling, and I was seconds into my warm-up at 2.5 miles per hour… and from the corner of my eye I saw what looked like a camera-flash. It happened again- oh, ok- someone opened an emergency door. There goes the annoying buzzer.

Nobody else is looking around or vacating their machines, so I didn’t bother to, either. I then heard something on the PA system, took out my headphones, and was greeted by a very chipper robotic voice echoing from the walls, stating that there was an emergency, and to “please- immediately leave the building.” Please?! About a minute goes by, and one by one folks begin to saunter away from their machines- most doing arm & upper-back stretches as they pitter-pat out the doors.

Nobody directs the crowd where to go, what to do- so folks just kinda mosey on out to the courtyard. There were benches about 20ft away from the doors, so folks just kinda gathered around those… which did seem a bit close to the 4-story building, but, whatever- the benches were great for stretching, Twittering, bullshitting. The gal next to me kept right on going with her workout, oblivious to the world around her. The guy on my other side just stood there, unaffected, sending email or SMSing or Twittering while immersed in the universe of his iPhone. About half the folks out there appeared to all be absorbed in each’s individual iWorld. The rest just stood there, staring blankly at the sidewalk.

Everyone was downward-focussed. Nobody looking-up, nobody paying attention, nobody talking. The guards just kinda walked around a bit, not really knowing what to do- but probably figuring they shouldn’t stand around.

The buzzer and robotic voice keep going, and after about 10 minutes I realized it sounded *exactly* like one of the echoey cityscape voices from the dystopic hyperreality of Los Angeles in 2019 that Ridley Scott crafted for Blade Runner. I thought back to fire drills when I was a kid. The obnoxious, quickly-paced and loud as hell bells were CRAZY alarming, made the peach-fuzz on my arm stand on end and my heart race- but in hindsight- that kind of seems like Grade-A critique of an alarm’s effectiveness.

The hypnotic, dronic, flatness of the UCSF Bakar Community Building’s alarm system certainly sounded expensive… but did it taste expensive? Did it even kind of work- beyond technically functioning? Is it just me, or does it seem to defeat the functional mandate of an alarm system, to be so polite and pleasant? I suppose that when considering a worst-case scenario of a building occupied at capacity, such an alarm could incite a stampede… which would be the opposite-backfiring and would put the building designers at a liability risk for causing deaths thru design-negligence. In emergencies people are to remain calm, and this alarm seemed to consider that at 110%… but there’s the flipside. In this scenario where the employees were untrained and the crowd-mentality dependent patrons were too engrossed in the hypnotic absorption of each’s individual workout, and there just weren’t a whole heckuf a lot of us- the calmness of the alarm system seemed to guide the experience with a much more complacent mood, than a real life-threatening emergency it seems should have been handled. Then again, there were emergency exits and glass, like, *everywhere*, so worst case scenario, I think we all woulda smelled the smoke, snapped out of it, and gotten to safety ok.

Anyhow- it took over a minute to get folks to even look-up from their music/tv/workout all-absorbing sensory experiences. Likewise the employees didn’t appear to have a clue on either what was happening or how to guide the gym members, and the guards served as little more than a peanut-gallery. I did go back-in after momentarily stepping-out, and asked a guard if I could just get my crap from my locker. He said no, and told me to go outside and that I could re-enter after the Fire Department said I could. Ok. He apparently knew what to do, but wasn’t exactly acting with urgency- nobody was. Nobody who was working there, nobody who was a patron.

On all levels, it was an epic fail. Was everyone waiting to smell smoke, hear the screams of children, or to see leaping flames?

The patrons acted like lemmings infected with iHypnosis, the employees just seemed vexed, for the guards it was just another adventure, for the designers of the alarm system it was clearly a FAILED usability test- tho not one with publishable findings awaiting digestion by eager-to-do-better designers.

Understandably, the firefighters were pissed. They, however… were some of the hottest SFFD specimens of manly yum-yum, that I’ve seen in a while… so between that, and inspiring this writing, maybe it was worth it?

In hindsight, I suppose that for honoring the risk of inciting a stampede and keeping occupants calm, the alarm did work well… it just failed, because it was 100% dependent on alert and with-it employees acting in a snappy & quick fashion to address the situation… and maybe that’s too much to expect from spoiled 19y/o college students making $12 at the local gym?

Some damn hot specimens of SFFD’s finest, indeed. At least my eyes got some dessert.