Fire Alarm Hell

Yesterday evening we had a few fire alarms, continuing the general trend that's been apparent since we got here. Then we had 24 hours without fire alarms. I started thinking this was a step forward. Maybe people were starting to remember about keeping the bathroom door closed when having a shower and turning on the extractor fan when cooking. Maybe the excessive number of fire alarms of our first few days was going to settle down to a general average of one a week or so.

Then we had a fire alarm this evening. Followed ten minutes later by another fire alarm. Which stopped again before I'd got out of my bedroom door. But then started again. And stopped again... This continued something like ten or fifteen times, for something like ten minutes. Clearly it was broken, and there was not only no real fire, but probably not even anybody setting it off with steam or cigarette smoke or anything. But right from the first alarm on the first day, I've never believed there was a real fire. I never will believe there is. That doesn't mean I won't evacuate. Not only am I a good little girl who follows all the rules, but I learnt two lessons from the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf: the obvious one of not crying wolf, but also that it's safest to believe people who do cry wolf, even when there is very unlikely to be an actual wolf, because if it happens enough times, those probabilities get multiplied up*, and it becomes fairly likely that there will be a wolf on one of the occasions. So every time the alarm was sounding I would move towards the exit until it stopped, when I would head back for my room. But the alarms must have been slightly longer than the silences, because I never got back to my room, and each time I ended up a little further away. Through the flat door and back in again, out again and down the stairs, up and down, up and down. Somehow, it didn't occur to me untill someone I met on the stairs suggested it that, although I had to go towards the exit when the alarm was on, I didn't have to go back again when it was off, and it would make more sense just to go outside** and wait it out. Which I did, and had a brief conversation with a girl from Egypt into the bargain, so it wasn't entirely wasted. But it was a relief when there was a long enough silence to suggest it had been fixed. So far, there hasn't been another one... but I'm not going to fall for it again. I know there'll be one along soon!

*Technical note added to assuage my mathematical conscience: the probabilities don't really get multiplied up. In any case, that would actually make them smaller^. The probability that there isn't a wolf gets multiplied by itself the number of times that wolf is cried^^, which gives a smaller value for the probability that there is never a wolf in all those times the greater the number of times wolf is cried, and thus a larger value for the probability that there is a wolf at least one of the times. But it's easier to write that they get multiplied up if you don't want to go into all this detail, and I suppose it's metaphorically true

**Recently, I've stopped going all the way out to the front. I think they told us we had to do that on the very first fire alarm- I suppose it makes sense as if you wait in the court until the blaze is a lot bigger and has taken over A block as well, there's no way of getting out of the hall without going through the flames. But most people from my block and the others round the courtyard (most of those people who bother coming down at all for the alarms, that is) just stay in the courtyard, and no staff appear to have told them not to, so I'm going to continue unless they do specifically tell us otherwise. After all, if it's a real fire, we'd probably realise before the flames reached A block (assuming they hadn't started there)- if they got that far at all, since the whole thing would probably be put out before that point.

^Since they're less than 1

^^That is, P(there is really a wolf at least once)= 1-P(there is never a wolf)
=1-(P(there isn't a wolf on a specific occasion)^n), where ^ means 'to the power of' and n is the number of times wolf is cried