Firedrills.

They used to be the welcome (albeit troublesome) respite from a boring (insert most hated subject) lesson during school days - the desperate ringing of the shrill alarm bell was sweet music compared to (insert most boring teacher's name)'s incessant droning.

I can't remember the last time I went through the exercise...was it during secondary school? Anyway, all I recall is that they always made us gather in the school field to take attendance.

Question: what if the school field caught fire? Where would we gather? Should there be a Plan B venue? And what if Plan A and B venues caught fire? Do we stand on the road? Run home? ...

Of course, being the typical Singaporean student, I kept these musings to myself.

Then today it happened, at my office building.

This morning I was greeted by a sign that said "Fire drill today".

Hmmm.

Didn't think much of it till I received an email from HR telling us all to "take the fire drill seriously".

Hmmm.

Then it started to rain cats & dogs & elephants & whales. I tried looking out of the window - it was a sheet of black. I couldn't even see the road; the rain was a shroud of dark water that enveloped the building. So I thought (as did the rest of my colleagues) that the firedrill would be postponed.

After all, how ironic that the building would "catch fire" amidst such a downpour.

Till I received an email from HR saying that "if it rains, meet in the front walkway".

(I thought a more plausible plan would be "if it rains like this, open the windows to put out the fire." But hey, what do I know?)

Then I assumed the walkway was OUTSIDE the building, though it seemed awfully small to contain all of the building's inhabitants.

Hmmm. Whatever. Carried on typing away.

Till I received a call from my manager informing me that "the firedrill will start in a few mins (insider info, you see), and you might want to take the lift down first before it gets shut down, and thus avoid the stampede in the stairway."

Good idea. Anything to get away from work, right? :)

So me and a few others giggled our way down to the walkway, and waited for the alarm to ring, and the other unfortunate souls to climb their way down.

We waited for 30 mins. No alarm yet.

Hmmm.

So we went to grab coffee. Might as well not waste the time standing around eh?

We went to a nearby coffee house, and found it surprisingly crowded, though it was mid-afternoon on a weekday. And the customers were mainly white-collared too. We learnt something today - teabreaks are quite the norm among other office staff, which bodes well for the 'workaholic' Singaporean.

We had a good time sipping our kopi and chatting away, and then one of us got an SMS saying that the alarm finally went off. By then it was 45 mins since we'd left the building.

We decided to stay put and sip our coffee a while longer - people take time to climb down the stairs, you know.

Finally, a good 1 hour since we left the office, we headed back to the walkway to take our attendance. Just in time too - 5 mins after putting our names down, we were told we could go back to our office.

If only firedrills were this fun. Though I did have one question:

What if the staircase caught fire?