If you pull fire alarms as a prank…

…You deserve to be pushed down all seven flights of stairs in q’əleχən.* At the bottom, as you stand up and brush yourself off, you should be handed your letter of expulsion from UBC. Then you should pick up your bags and leave. Hopefully the door hits you in the backside on the way out.

Does it sound harsh? Yes. But here’s why it needs to be:

When you pull a fire alarm, especially in the middle of the night, you create a panic, never mind an inconvenience. You have created an emergency situation where none needed to exist. And that’s not funny. You put your fellow students in danger by creating a hazard.

What’s more, pulling the fire alarm activates emergency services. And because we’re a building full of people, instead of just one person calling 911, the fire trucks and ambulances put us in priority. This means that, false alarm or not, they will start making their way to UBC. By pulling that alarm, you have potentially taken away the emergency services from someone in an actual emergency.

At my middle school, a teacher caught a student trying to pull an alarm. (Yes, that’s how juvenile this behaviour is). He sat the student down and told him a story. The last school he taught at had a prank fire alarm. There was no fire drill planned so EMS came to the school. Because the school got priority, a little boy on the other side of town who was having a real medical emergency died. You don’t want to be the cause of that kind of suffering in your own community. You really don’t.

Finally, it costs your residence a certain amount of cash every time you pull that alarm. That’s not coming out of UBC’s pocket; it’s coming out of the funds that go towards your services and parties here on res. If you want the good times to continue, stop wasting our funds on an annoying alarm.

So as you can probably tell, I was woken up last night by a fire alarm.  It was 1:47 am, and the first thing that crossed my mind was “that doesn’t sound like a fire alarm. (It’s a very industrial noise. Sounds more like a radiation warning alarm.)” Second was “whoever pulled that the night before midterms—especially Gateman’s midterm—is a real ass.” It’s not a good thing when students come to expect that when the alarm goes off, nothing is actually wrong. A fire alarm signifies an emergency. Don’t desensitize your neighbours to that alarm, or in the event of a real fire, people might not bother getting up. And again, you don’t want that to be your fault.

If you pulled the alarm last night, shame on you. You’re attending one of the best universities in the world. You should know better.

This concludes my rant. Have a happy, fire alarm-free day.

*Engineers: before you say that that’s not possible as our fire alarm puller will simply roll out the window, know that I plan to allow students affected by the alarm stand on each landing with plywood to bounce our roller off of… and also the stairs part of the punishment is purely wishful thinking.