Friday, January 18, 2008

Stop, Drop and Roll

You see, the fire department was back for day #2 of testing our building fire alarm system.

Since we are nearing completion on the construction of our newsroom, it’s time to get final inspections. One of the most important inspections is the fire/safety inspection. In the event of a fire, the safety of every single newsroom employee is top priority. Rest assured the system works. In fact, my ears are still ringing at home…some eight hours later.

I totally understand that fire alarms are supposed to be loud but the tests were not 10-20 second bursts of the ole’ sirens. Instead, they were more like 4-5 minutes of non-stop (urrrnnnk…..urrrnnnnkkk…..urrrrnnnnkkk). If that wasn’t bad enough 50 strobe lights began flashing. All this while trying to listen to scanners, get updates from reporters who were calling in from the field and responding to viewers tips and emails. We quickly realized that…urrrnnnk…(sorry I couldn’t resist) conversations of any sort, no matter how important, were simply not going to happen while the tests were going on.

Our resident blogger, Ginny, actually became annoyed enough with the situation that she blogged about it, and even posted a short video clip to further explain our pain. Meanwhile, I’m now deaf (what did you just say?), my eyes still feel like I spent too long inside a techno disco club and the headache is still pounding. Ahhhhh…the sound of safety (urrrnnnk…..urrrnnnnkkk…..urrrrnnnnkkk).