Where There’s Smoke, There’s Incompetence

My school likes to encourage students who have just enrolled for the next school year, so they get students who are in their second year to do a presentation. After the presentation they take the new students on a tour. I volunteer to do such a thing with three other students in my class, and all goes well, but right after the presentation the fire alarm goes off.

We all evacuate including the new students, but our school is quite big; all the students take up a lot of space around the building. We see no smoke. I’ve already heard this was not a drill from a teacher, but the lack of smoke is annoying the new students and the parents who brought them, most of whom look to me for guidance because I am the only girl of the volunteers and the oldest of them.

After an hour we can finally get back into the building. We do the tour with less students, because some have gone home out of annoyance. I go home late due to the delay and because I volunteered after-school hours.

Later I learn that one of the students from stage tech forgot to turn off the fire alarm before testing the smoke machine.