It’s been a long four days here in New Orleans. We have played a lot of intense bridge, gotten up relatively early to do sightseeing in the mornings, stayed up late with friends… There just hasn’t been enough time to do all that AND get enough sleep. So at the end of the fourth day, we were pretty beat. We skipped the midnight celebration this time and went back to the room. Didn’t go to bed right away; Lance and i had our own post-mortem discussion about hands. But we were looking forward to a long night’s sleep and went to bed around 1 am.
At 6 am, however, we were interrupted by a loud buzzing sound. We picked up our heads, a bit dazed, looking around. “What’s that?” When it didn’t go away, we jumped out of bed, realizing it was the fire alarm. It hadn’t immediately registered, b/c the alarm was frankly a very pathetic, not-urgent-sounding buzzing. But that’s the only thing it could be.
So we threw our clothes on and i learned what i would take with me in an emergency – i grabbed my phone and my purse. Not very original, but i was very intent on those two things as we were rushing around trying to get out before we burned up.
We ran to the stairs with a few other people and quickly went down this small concrete stairwell. Very hot and claustrophobic, with about a dozen people in our cluster that was racing down the stairs. I had a very panic-filled descent, as my thoughts quickly went to another emergency where people were racing down stairs, eight and a half years ago, and they were trapped.
About halfway down, the alarm stopped. One of the women in our group said “i think i can smell smoke, i still want to go down.” No one was slowing or arguing.
Of course it was a false alarm. As we wandered back into the hotel and past the front desk, i heard the hotel staff on the phones with guests who had called down wondering if it was a real fire. And i thought to myself, perhaps unfairly, that those must be the stupid people. But i mean, really. Is it really worth your life not to get out of bed because it would be inconvenient if it was a false alarm?
Went back upstairs, got a few more hours sleep. It should be enough to get us through the day.