WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE BY NOellE moore Picture this: It’s your day off from class and you’re warm and snug in your bed, catching up on the hours of sleep your insane workload has deprived you of. Then suddenly, the violent blare of a siren cuts through your sweet dreams and you awaken to a strobe-light party in your room. For a moment, you don’t know what the hell is happening. Is there a tornado? A bomb? Have the Russians invaded? It doesn’t take long for the confusion to evolve like a Pokemon into a bigger, badder, angrier beast. Outback used Fire Drill! It’s not very effective. If you’re one of the residents of Outback like I am, you know all too well of the fire drills that plague our lives like some voodoo curse bent on depriving us of sleep, peace, quiet, and our sanity. The most recent fire drill occurred on a cold Wednesday morning at six o’fucking clock in the morning, two weeks after another fire drill –at around 8 AM on a Saturday. Now I’m not a fire-marshal, I’ve never claimed to be, but I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of these “drills” were just that: drills. I can recall one particular evening when the alarm went off for a legitimate reason. After being ushered outside and standing there for a near halfhour, we had the momentary excitement of seeing fire-trucks stampede into campus, but what lingered was the irritation and exasperation that one of our neighbors doesn’t know how to cor-
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rectly make popcorn in a microwave. It has a button labeled “Popcorn” for Gosling’s sake. Now to some degree I understand the need for these drills – the school and state have a quota of fire-drills that they are required to have throughout the semester—but there is a line between necessary safety-precautions and infuriatingly excessive precautions. Outback has had at least seven over the course of this school year. I’ve observed the other dorms around the Quad having one, two, three max. Alyce Pellegrino, another resident of Outback shared my sentiments: “They wouldn’t really be that bad if the majority of them weren’t taking place before 8 AM. I understand they’re important, but this is college—I need all the sleep I can get.” It takes all of my self-control and that of my neighbors not to lash out, cuss at, and maim the poor RAs who are banging on our doors and directing us to evacuate. We know it isn’t their faults that this is happening, but when the sun isn’t even up and you’re being shoved out into twenty degree temperatures, many times before you’re able to get a coat or even shoes, for something that lasts a grand total of five minutes, it’s a given that you’re going to be pissed. Perhaps Purchase needs a reminder of how the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf ended. We can be The Dorm that Cried Fire because honestly I’m at the point where I’d rather take my chances with an inferno rather than drag my sleepy ass out of bed.