The fire alarm is tested every Wednesday at ten, and the fire wardens on each floor press a panel to say their area is clear, and the panels log who pressed and when. On the second floor the panel is pressed before the alarm has finished its first ring, from a panel position that was taken off the wall in the refit, by a warden number that is nobody's, and the second floor is logged clear while four hundred people are still sitting at their desks.
I am the health and safety officer at a call centre and the Wednesday test is the most boring ten minutes of my week, except on the second floor.
The test.
Ten o'clock, Wednesday, the alarm sounds for thirty seconds. Nobody moves, because it is the test. The wardens on each floor go to their panels and press acknowledge, so the system logs that a warden was there, and in a real alarm they press clear when the floor is empty, and the panels log all of it with the warden's number.
On the second floor, clear is pressed in the first second.
The panel.
There were four on the second floor before the refit. There are three. The fourth was by the old stairwell, which is a cupboard now, and the panel was taken off the wall, and the position was deleted from the system.
It logs. Every Wednesday, at ten and one second, floor two, panel four, clear, warden number, and the number is not on my list and has never been on my list, and the floor is full.
What has been checked.
The system, by the alarm company, who found panel four in the log and not in the configuration and said what everybody says.
The cupboard, at ten on a Wednesday, by me, standing where the panel was. The alarm went. And before I had heard the first full ring, there was the sound of a panel button, the click, from the wall at my shoulder, from paint, and the log on my phone said floor two clear, and I said, it isn't, and nothing answered me.
Who.
The warden numbers from before the refit are in a drawer in HR that nobody has cleared, on laminated cards, and the number is on one of them, with a name, and the name is a man who was a warden on the second floor for years and who, the day of the refit's first drawing, was on the list of people whose roles were not being carried forward, which is a way of saying it.
The old hands remember him as a nuisance. A man who took the test seriously. Who went round the floor on a Wednesday telling people it might not be a test one day, who stood at his panel with his hand over the button, who had, on one occasion, cleared the floor for real for a burning toaster and been laughed at for a month.
He is at his panel. He presses clear at ten and one second because he was always going to be the first, and because there is nobody on the floor that he can see to wait for.
The week it was not a test.
A Wednesday, in the spring. Ten o'clock. The alarm. And it did not stop after thirty seconds, because there was a fire, a small one, in a bin, in the kitchen on the second floor, and the smoke went up, and the floor did what a floor does when it has heard the test every Wednesday for years, which is nothing.
Panel four logged clear at ten and one second, as it always did.
And then it logged something else. Ten and forty seconds. Panel four, floor two, evacuate, which is a button that a warden presses to override the test tone and sound the full alarm on their floor, and which was pressed, from paint, and the full alarm went on the second floor, the real one, the one people have not heard, and four hundred people stood up.
They got out. The bin was put out. Nobody was hurt. And the log for that Wednesday has floor two cleared, for real, at ten past ten, by three wardens, and above them, at ten and forty, by a fourth who is on no list, and who had waited nine years at a patch of paint for the week he was right.
What is done about it.
The Wednesday clear from panel four is still logged, every week, in the first second, and I have stopped writing it up as an anomaly, and the fire officer has seen the log from the spring and asked who pressed evacuate, and I have shown him the laminated card, and he has said nothing, and signed the report.
What I do.
I run the tests.
I have put the panel back. Not a working one, the alarm company would not do that for a position that does not exist. A panel, a real one, with no wires, on the wall by the cupboard, where it was, with a warden's card in the holder beside it, his, laminated, from the drawer.
He presses it at ten and one second. The log shows clear. And I have started going to the second floor on a Wednesday and standing beside the panel when the alarm goes, and when the click comes I say, what a warden says to another warden, which is, cheers, mate, floor's yours, and then I do his round. Along the floor, between the desks, saying to the agents what he used to say, which is that it might not be a test one day, and they roll their eyes, as they did at him, and one Wednesday it was not, and he was the only one ready, and I have decided that a floor should have one person on it who takes it seriously, and that it might as well be two.