Fire Drill

I have a confession to make... I'm really bad at taking pictures! Not only are the quality of my pictures awful, so I get really stressed if someone asks me to take a photo for them. But I get so self conscience when I want to take a selfie or picture of something going on around me.  I don't really know how to explain it, but I just don't want to look like one of those silly millenials, or silly tourists who is always taking selfies, or letting the beauty pass by behind their phones or whatever.

But I must say I always regret not having the pictures I thought about taking.  I'm hoping maybe this blog will help me be more adventurous in taking pictures, because who wants to read just a bunch of words?? BORING!

Anyways today it didn't help me be anymore adventurous so I don't have any fun pictures of the events of my fire drill, but let me tell you... it was an experience!!

So today at work I participated in a full on fire drill.  I haven't done one of those since high school.  I know at Humana we did drills a couple of times where we would gather by the emergency exit and our leaders would be like ok this is where you go for an emergency, but we wouldn't ever actually leave the building or anything like that.

But let me tell you, here in Mexico they take these drills VERY seriously.  They told us yesterday that it would happen today sometime between 10-11, but they couldn't tell us exactly when, I guess the element of surprise had to be there.

Around 10:30 they came in and told us the drill was starting so I get up and follow everyone to the emergency exit and expect to be told instructions on what to do if there ever were an emergency... however that isn't what happened at all.

We went outside and had to climb down the emergency exit stairs, while everyone on the floors above us were also trying to get down these narrow stairs.  Luckily my office is on the "first" floor, but there are actually 3 floors that are maintenance floors that are below the first floor, then the entrance, and the emergency stairs took us out through the garage so that's another flight... my first floor office we still had to climb down 5 flights of stairs!!

Once we got down the stairs I just followed everyone and we ended up walking around the building and down the sidewalk a good 2 blocks, all the while they had streets blocked off so we could cross, people with walkie talkies... I mean this drill was legit!

I was walking next to one of the other consultants in my group, he's of Indian descent and some woman on the street came up and asked him if we were marching or demonstrating for some cause, poor guy didn't understand her and just mumble yo no se.  He then was like yeah that's the only thing I've learned to say, I'm able to blend in here which is nice, but then everyone expects me to speak Spanish.  So I told him what she asked and he seemed shocked I speak Spanish... haha yeah I'm full of surprises.

Once we got to the rallying point we had to find the person from our office holding a sign with our company name on it (because of course in an emergency someone is going to remember to grab that sign)... my company was at the very end of the line and once we got there we were told we needed to stand in lines 4-5 people deep.

We proceeded to stand around for around 15-20 minutes waiting I guess for them to clear the building and verify everyone was safe, which I'm sure was hard to do because I saw many people going and getting coffee haha.

Once we were allowed to start walking back we were again instructed to walk standing in lines of 4 people, and they were very serious about this, they would walk down our lines and count to make sure we had 4 people in our lines.  I half expected to be told to hold hands to stay in line haha.  It was so congested with people however that it took about 10 minutes to walk the 2 blocks back to the building.  We would literally walk about 10 steps and then wait for a minute and then walk another few steps. It was very tedious.

We were then escorted around to the garage again, and I started to get super grumpy because I thought we were going to have to climb back up those blasted stairs.

Sure getting exercise is good, but I can't breathe here in Mexico, not only is the altitude too high for me, and the medicine I got to help with that isn't working, the smog is AWFUL!! Just trying to have a regular conversation with someone causes me to loose my breathe!

However luckily we didn't have to climb up the stairs, they had us take the maintenance elevator up to our floor... and for anyone who is even a little nervous about elevators I'm sure they would have been running for the stairs.  This elevator was one of nightmares.  The walls were covered in plywood and graffiti, and you could smell that it was used to take the trash out.  But again luckily I'm on the first floor, so I didn't have to stay on that overly crowded elevator for too long.

So that was about the most eventful part of my day.  Has your office ever done full on fire drills like that before? I know schools do... but I've never participated in one like this outside of school!