We didn't start the fire...

So, today while I was home for lunch, just before I was about to leave to take Josh back to the baby sitter's, the fire alarm went off. I’m talking the lights-flashing-horns-blaring fire alarm. I was on the phone with my sister Lisa and Josh was sitting in the living room. When the alarm went off, poor Josh just started screaming, so I hung up the phone without explaining anything and grabbed Josh and headed to the lobby.

I looked up in the girls hall and told them to all go outside (most of them were standing in the hall). One of the girls in our dorm took Josh outside and I went down to the boys hall. They were all standing around looking startled. I told them we had to evacuate and got 2 of them to run up to make sure everyone was out of the girls hall. Some of them were staggering out of their rooms because they had been asleep (as in- they hadn’t even gotten up for the day yet!!! Lazy bones!!!) Anyway- one poor guy was in the shower when it went off, and his roommates yelled in to him that we were supposed to evacuate so he threw on a pair of jeans and a jacket and came outside commando-style!
I called the housing office- no answer- they were out to lunch. I waited a couple minutes, or maybe like 40 seconds, and called the housing office again. They were there this time so I told them what was going on. While I was talking to her, two maintenance guys showed up and told me they would let us know if we could go back inside. While we were waiting, I told the kids that we should be glad it is such a nice day today and not raining or snowing or something. Lucky us! Then I called the babysitter and told her we would be a bit late coming back from lunch. Then I called my poor sister to explain why I just hung up on her! She said she figured it was the fire alarm, but I felt really bad for just hanging up on her- I just panicked when Josh started screaming. So Lisa- if you are reading this- I'm really sorry if I had you worried!

I hadn’t seen any smoke or anything when I was walking around the halls so I figured there was just some glitch. It took about 10 minutes, but the maintenance guys finally came and said we could go back in. They didn’t find anything wrong- but I guess the same thing happened in another dorm earlier today. Anyway- what a lunch break, right? Wow.