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We didn’t start the fire

This semester, I have Mr. Mumtaz for two of my classes. These days, good old Room 319 has been really cold, and he’s been powerless to stop it. When the students complain about how cold it is, he has his line ready: “Because I’m the coolest teacher.” Incidentally, he uses a similar reply for when the classroom is too hot: “Because I’m the hottest teacher.” It makes me want to say, “Your classroom is really smelly,” so he can say that he’s the smelliest teacher.

Yesterday, early in the morning, the room was particularly cold, so I had my opportunity to use the joke on him as he sent me to his car to get his jacket. He didn’t fall for my bait, but he laughed (after I assured him that I was kidding about the room smelling bad). When I headed back to class from the parking lot, I did notice that it smelled kind of strange, and I mentioned it to Mr. Mumtaz (“It does smell kind of funny here after all”), but I didn’t think much of it after that.

About fifteen minutes later, as the school’s morning TV-type show was about to start, a school administrator came on the PA and announced a Code Orange — a general evacuation. It was not a drill, he said. Of course, I got very nervous. What could happen that would cause an evacuation? Obviously, if it wasn’t some kind of bomb threat (a Code Black), it would have to be a gas leak or something. (I had never even heard of the phenomenon known as the gas leak until going to a public school. Even now, the idea seems strange and foreign to me. But I did know that if it were a gas leak, things would not be pretty.)

We went to the football field as the emergency plans dictate. “We” meaning the entire school. Obviously, this took quite a while, and some people ended up getting separated from their classes. Each class is supposed to sit together on the bleachers, and the teachers are supposed to see to it that none of their students are missing. After a while of sitting around, the few students who had gone in separate directions returned to the fold. I was still pretty nervous because it’s never good when you have to evacuate a building. I wondered if they were going to tell us what it was all about. Eventually, they did.

Apparently, a teacher had smelled smoke, and at some point the decision was made to evacuate the whole building. The fire department came to check it out. They declared it was due to faulty wiring. Not long after the announcement, they declared Room 322 and the rest of the building to be safe. After we got back to the building, I saw exactly how close to this Room 322 I had been — I had actually been walking past it when I smelled something funny just about fifteen minutes before the Code Orange was given.

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