Stuck In The Middle With (All 5,000 Of) You

October 5th, 2002 Posted in 2002

Fire drill in my 50-storey building at 11:00 today.

I’d seen the postings on the wall for weeks but not really registered it—otherwise I would have made sure to have already been out of the building when the alarm started going off.

What a waste of time. I can empathize with the building administrators, who are obligated to do this kind of thing every so often to avoid lawsuits; test the sirens, ensure the right doors lock and unlock when they’re supposed to. But really, couldn’t they just hire a few guys to go through the paces and leave everyone else out of it? There’s no benefit to a fire drill for the people working in it: 1.) You go to the stairs. 2.) You walk down the stairs. When you reach the bottom, 3.) you walk outside. It’s not terribly complicated. Why we need to “drill” this every six months like we’re being asked to navigate through some Elizabethan hedge maze is beyond me.

The siren wails at full volume as everyone on my floor grabs their coats and heads for the stairs. I enter into the vast line of people descending the emergency staircase and, single file, we trudge downwards.

For an entire floor. Then, the line stops dead. Vague mumblings and laughter. This stretches to two minutes.

To ten minutes.

To fifteen minutes.

Eventually someone pipes up, “Wouldn’t we all be dead by now?”

“Yeah,” I respond. “The How Fast Can We Kill Everybody drill was a huge success!”

Some laughter, more looking at watches. I cock my head upwards at the staircase spiraling up thirty floors—hundreds and hundreds of hands on the railings. I look downwards at hundreds and hundreds of hands on the railings. The temperature begins to rise from all the body heat. It’s a large tumult of conversations, laughter, anger, yelling, and stomping.

I begin, despite myself, to wonder about the strength of the staircase—visualize without wanting to me in trapped like a sardine, hearing the enormous sound like a banshee wail of heavy steel bending and snapping, the moorings giving way under the weight, the sudden lurch as the ground gave way. I see the railing I would grab onto. How long would that hold? How long could I hang on with bodies and cement chunks and steel flying past me?

I should mention that I’m mildly agoraphobic. It’s also called demophobia, enochlophobia and ochlophobia (I wonder if there’s a fear of redundant naming?). Whatever you call it, it means I hate crowds.

Not ALL crowds. I can go to a ballgame or a concert or a fair or even a crowded bar and not even notice it. It’s hard to explain what specifically sets it off—all I can give in the way of explanation is that every one of the venues I just named involve tickets, head-counting, seats if you need them, and at least some semblance of order. There might be 30,000 heads at a Stones concert; but there are also 30,000 tickets and 30,000 seats, so as long as I’ve got some assurance that someone thought about this before I did, I don’t care.

What sets me off is a tightly-packed crowd, an agitated crowd—chaotic, riled—in an unexpected or uncontrolled situation. Shopping at Christmas fills me with dread for this reason. Ditto walking down Yonge Street at certain times of the day, when it’s too busy to accommodate the sheer numbers, and so everybody simultaneously decides THEY deserve preferential treatment.

I suspect at the root of this fear is an intense cynicism towards my fellow man’s nobility. I tend to see people in situations like this—in an overcrowded street; packed in a mall running after rapidly depleting items; getting antsy in a crowded, packed-to-capacity-and-still-filling staircase—as dumb, unthinking, self-centred little trolls. I know people aren’t like this - I’m merely referring to the well-known “mob mentality” phenomenon that takes hold of a crowd given any sort of stress or adversity, however small.

As individuals, I don’t doubt there are some sterling examples of patience and virtue. As a collective, though, we are shameful. Kids run around screaming; people elbow each other out of the way; toss garbage unthinkingly in the paths of others; pick fights with other people; scream; yell; say horrible things; shriek with laughter; act like animals. Add some chaos to that mix, like putting too many people in an enclosed space…. well, all I see when I look around is a group of savages. And I panic. I want out.

This lack of trust also extends to my irrational panic attack about the staircase crumbling under the weight. Whenever I’m in a situation like this where I even have the inkling of an idea that this hasn’t been prepared for in advance, I suspect the worst. Was this staircase built with the thought in mind that every one of the building’s tenants would stand on it all at once, all the way up fifty floors, for ten minutes? Twenty? Half an hour?

Not helping me calm down at all is the air raid siren still whooping, bouncing off the closed-in staircase, amplifying itself to irritatingly loud decibel levels. I’m not freaking out yet. I’m holding it together. But I’m definitely NOT having a good time. Occasional loud thumps five stories up, most likely someone dropping a briefcase, make me jump half a foot. I’m scrunched in tight as a sardine, and I note that, of course, other people are still trying to crowd into the already full stairwell.

Finally, after what seems like twenty minutes of not moving, I do start to freak out. No gnashing of teeth, or froth at the mouth, or whatever. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. I slowly work my way backwards to the door out to the 18th floor, and wait for the attack to pass. I head for the nearest room and sit down for a minute. As it turns out, it’s a boardroom.

As I’m sitting there, someone walks by, looks in, and says “We’ll meet back here in fifteen minutes, finish off the meeting.” His head disappears. Re-appears a second later. “Who are you?” he asks.

“I just wanted a breather,” I say.

“Oh,” he says.

“Can I still come to the meeting?”