You Have Heard of Fire, Right?

One of the more remarkable quirks of the denizens of West of the Rivers is their total obliviousness to alarms, of every sort.  Twenty minutes ago, the fire alarm inside Starbucks went off, at a sufficient volume to curdle the milk in my cup of coffee, and other than looking up briefly, no-one, neither the employees nor the patrons, stopped what they were doing, or investigated the cause of it, or made any move to leave the premises (except for the people who had just been handed their coffee.)  I snapped close my son’s journal, got up from the counter and walked out!

In the fifteen years I’ve been working in the City of Mists, I have seen hundreds of people, literally hundreds, continue to enter the Central Terminal building in search of their buses, walking beneath actively flashing and ringing fire alarms, some stopping their ears as they go past.  Presumably they conclude that if there actually was a fire or other emergency, there would be barriers to prevent their progress, and/or a cop telling them to get lost.  God forbid there ever actually is a fire.  They’re all gonna burn to death.