That ringing noise is nothing to get alarmed about

Date Published: 09-May-2012

Is it a uniquely Irish thing to not alone ignore ringing alarms, but to actually get annoyed if nobody rushes to turn them off?

By their nature, an alarm should indicate an emergency and the natural response should see you scurrying for the exit, or, if you’re a good neighbour, rushing towards the source of the noise to see if there’s a break-in or a problem you can help with.

Instead, when an alarm goes off in a pub, for example, you presume it’s been triggered accidentally and if you sit tight and try and ignore the din for a few minutes, normality will be restored.

Equally, if the house alarm next door kicks off, you hope it will run out of battery before you go to bed because it’s hard enough to listen to it during the day-time but it’s next to impossible to sleep through.

You never think for one minute that the reason the alarm is sounding is because the adjoining house has been burgled and the lone resident is lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor – any more than you think the pub is on fire and you’d better make for the exit.

I remember a night in Manchester some years ago – in fact it coincided with a Saw Doctors’ gig in the city but they had nothing to do with the incident – when a fire alarm sounded at about four in the morning in the hotel.

Now I presumed it was some eejit who’d had too much to drink and was running around the corridors – probably without some if not all of his clothes – who was hitting the button for the craic. But when hotel staff knocked on all doors, you knew it was time to take this a little more seriously.

So I got up, got dressed, put my contact lenses in, packed my case and headed for the emergency meeting point the adjacent car park – where I was greeted by the sight of several hundred people who obviously took the word ‘emergency’ in a more literal sense and had been standing there in the cold in their pyjamas and underwear for the previous 20 minutes.

Now while I felt particularly snug and smug in my day-time dress, it was only afterwards that I realised that, if there actually was a fire, I’d have been toast before I’d have my lenses back in to be able to see the flames.

On another occasion, at a time when I was working in a different newspaper, there was a particular editor who insisted that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances when he was thinking.

As this was not a task he appeared to bother a whole lot with in the normal course of events, these occasion bouts of thinking rarely presented a problem – but one day he was locked away in his office when a fire drill took place.

That involved all of the staff fleeing the building and, as it turned out, heading for the adjoining public house – which, if there had been a fire, would have burned every bit as quickly as the newspaper office itself.

The point was that, in the meantime, our editor concluded his bout of thinking and emerged from his office to find a newsroom which minutes earlier had housed three dozen journalists was now emptier than Bertie Ahern’s bank account.

Which only goes to prove that too much thinking can be as bad for you as not thinking at all – or that the last thing you should ever do when you hear an alarm going off in any context….is to get too alarmed about it.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.