The fire alarm went off while I was in chem class today.
I was doing some stoichiometry calculations in the lecture area of the classroom when the fire alarm went off for seemingly no reason. The fire alarm consists of 1-2 audible signals: a siren tone that plays over the loudspeaker in each classroom and a standard horn/strobe combination fire alarm in some classrooms, including all of those in the science/500 building. (The trailer classrooms/700 classrooms also tend to have fire alarms of their own. One of the gyms also has speaker/strobe combination fire alarms.) In each science classroom, there is one fire alarm horn/strobe and one fire alarm strobe, one of which is in the lecture area and the other in the lab area. In the science building, there is uniformity with the fire alarms, so the same fire alarm devices (same series and manufacturer) exist in every classroom. In my chem teacher's classroom, the horn/strobe is in the lab area while the strobe is in the lecture area.
So here goes the story. I was solving stoichiometry problems and the fire alarm went off. It startled me and got my heart racing, but the sound of the electronic horn going off behind me was surprisingly quiet. (The horn/strobe must have been set to low volume.) After about a minute or two, the siren stopped and the horn kept sounding for a little bit before the fire alarms were reset. My chem teacher told us to wait for an announcement over the loudspeaker on the status of the alarm as our school normally does when the fire alarm sounds. (Our school has had a lot of false alarms pulled by students who wanted to get out of tests or finals.) We continued minding our own business and were cleared over the loudspeaker. Presumably, someone pulled the fire alarm intentionally to get out of something.
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