But the experience taught me plenty about myself. I have always thought I would make a great hero, like Sylvester Stallone in Rocky or anyone who sat through Sylvester Stallone in Rocky V. A take charge kind of guy. Turns out I was wrong.
For starters, when the alarm tore me from my slumber, I didn’t even look for a fire. No thought to ‘get down low and go, go, go’. I just jumped up and waved my arms around, desperately trying to stop the incessant beeping. Had there been an actual fire my charred body would have been discovered up a ladder with a battery in my hand.
I’d also like to know what set the smoke alarm off in the first place; I certainly wasn’t sleep-barbecuing. Plus, smoke alarms were the last alarms I trusted. Car alarms – no one pays attention to them. Same with house alarms; you walk by thinking, “hope they steal something of value.”
Even the fire drill at work causes no movement from the computer: “Let me know if it’s real, because I’m about to win an auction on eBay here…”
Knowing that “emergency” is probably not my ultimate state of being, I still take the emergency exit seat on a plane. But if the plane was actually going down, I’d be hopeless. The hostess would be running around yelling, “Open the doors!” and I’d be sitting there apologising, “Look… I am genuinely sorry. I’m really here for the legroom… I’ll be honest – I lied back at the check-in counter. I kind of heard what you said, but was thinking about whether or not to take my shoes off. I throw women and children on the fire right?’”
It’d be nice to know you’re the kind of person people can count on in an emergency. Like that guy from the movie 127 Hours – the one who got trapped between a rock and a canyon and hacked his own arm off. He impressed me. You’d call on him straight away as he’d be fantastic in an emergency. Unless of course that emergency required someone to clap. I liked that he had a calmness about him. I don’t have that; I’d panic and hack my own leg off if my shoelace got caught in the escalator stairs. People asking, “Why didn’t you take your shoe off?”; “Shut up and push the wheelchair.”
