So here’s this story in today’s New York Times, upon reflection a rather odd story. The author recalls the time a fire broke out in an apartment building where she, her husband, and her then infant son lived. She describes their hurried exit from their home.
He runs around collecting papers and he grabs his laptop. We’re told that the laptop contains a website whose proceeds largely support the young family, so it makes some sense that the first thing he’d think of is his family’s livelihood. Although it’s odd. More about that in a minute, after we get out the door.
She, having been interrupted in the process of getting ready for bed, puts her pants on, collects her toothbrush, and grabs a hunting knife, which she slides into her belt band — before she picks up the sleeping baby and heads out of the place.
Outdoors, there’s snow on the ground. She arrives on the icy pavement in her bare feet.
They escape the fire, linger long enough to watch the flames consume the building, then get in their car and drive away. Their dog, she remarks at this point, is “cowering at our feet.”
Does anything here strike you as strange? To me, it’s possessed of weirdness.
To start with, the last thing I’d pick up before grabbing the kid is a 79-cent toothbrush. Even if it was a $60 electric number, the kid would come first.
Would I put my pants on? Maybe. I’d be more inclined to at least get into a pair of slippers, if I didn’t have a pair of slide-on shoes that I could step into; then I’d grab the pants, carry them downstairs with the baby, and get dressed once I was outside the building.
What about the knife? Maybe, if it was an heirloom — if it was my father’s favorite fishing knife and it was sitting on a table, I might grab it. If I believed I needed a weapon, I’d take a gun. In fact, if I could get to the gun quickly enough, I’d take it simply to prevent risk of its being stolen and used later in a crime. If it took any time to get at it — for example, if it had to be extricated from a safe or an elaborate hiding place — I would leave it.
But the heirloom issue doesn’t appear to have been the case. The narrative suggests she simply saw it and picked it up on impulse. Odd. I mean…you think you need self-defense against rapacious firemen? Wha-a-t?
The dog is not mentioned until the story’s last lines.
Odd.
If it were me, the child would come first: before the clothing, before the toothbrush, before the knife, before the papers, before the computer.
The dog would come second.
The papers would probably come third — no, make that fourth, after the car keys.
And the computer, a distant fifth.
Now, about that computer: What? Their website resides on a laptop? Really?
So is he using a laptop as a server? Really? Why doesn’t the profit-making website reside on someone else’s servers? It’s not like, say, BlueHost would break you up in business. Even their premium services are pretty reasonable. If I had a money-making website whose income I depended on, I certainly would back up every byte of data off-site. And why isn’t he using something like Carbonite to automatically back up his data, far far away from potentially combustible real estate? Many such services exist, and none of them cost much.
Many people subscribe to the idea that you should have a “go-box” where you keep crucial papers like your passports and the deed to your house, as well as memorabilia that you’d like not to lose. I like that plan — it makes a lot of sense, assuming the fire or other Disaster of the Day isn’t between you and said box. In my case, I really don’t have anyplace to stash such a thing. Key documents are in a file drawer, which itself is full — no room in there for a box. The shelves in the office closet are full. The garage (which also hosts a file cabinet) is the most likely site where a fire would start: a car with a large gasoline tank sits backed up close to a gas heater.
But the computer… Ah, the computer.
Nothing should reside solely on a computer in such a way that the only way to rescue data is physically to remove the machine from the building. The young father shouldn’t have had to even think of rescuing an inanimate object when his wife and infant son were in a burning structure.
It’s simply too easy and too cheap to back up everything off-side, automatically. There really is no reason either to leave your data at the mercy of a thief, a fire, or a natural disaster or to have to risk your life to make a side-trip through smoke and flames to retrieve a computer.
Virtual box in the cloud. Real box in the closet. And a set of priorities: think through who or what should be rescued first — before the fact.
My mother, youngest brother and I were staying in a Marriott hotel in Seattle one cold rainy weekend in November a number of years ago.
We had settled in and just fallen asleep, when the fire alarm went off. I jumped out of bed, and immediately checked to be sure that my brother (who can sleep through ANYTHING) was waking up.
If I remember correctly, I pulled on pants, and grabbed my shoes and coat – my brother got his glasses, pants and shoes on, and was ready to go as I was dithering around trying to figure out what else to grab.
I told him to go – my mom was getting her shoes on – and I grabbed my laptop, purse with passport/wallet/plane tickets etc in it – and our hotel key cards – and we headed out.
We then stood outside in the drizzling rain for about half an hour freezing until they let us back in – no word on what caused the alarm to go off.
I have to say – the piercing, relentless, shriek of the alarm, rattles your brain and makes it SO HARD to think rationally – so while I can’t see how the mother didn’t grab her child FIRST – I *can* see them grabbing random items.
Wow! That’s a story. I can’t think of many things more scary than the prospect of a fire in a hotel. I had a friend, a photographer who was on assignment in Asia, who was in a huge, disastrous hotel fire in…Singapore? I think…or maybe Shanghai. Not the same: but I don’t recall the city offhand. In his case, he had family with him, including a young boy. The fire WAS on their floor; they were trapped in their room with smoke rolling in under the door, and they were many floors up in the air. They were very lucky to survive — a lot of people died in that one.
I was in Atlanta once, on about the fifteenth floor of a fancy high-rise hotel. My husband had gone off to a meeting; I was working, as usual — probably grading student papers or writing them myself — and I heard a little commotion outside. Looked outside the window to see an ARMY of fire trucks, ambulances, cops and whatnot in the street in front of the building.
There were at least three or four hook-and-ladder trucks, none of which, of course, could reach above about the fourth floor. I thought “what the hell?” and stepped out into the corridor. There I found a frightened cleaning lady and a fire alarm ringing.
The alarm was NOT AUDIBLE INSIDE THE ROOM!
I said “what’s going on?” And she said “I don’t know but they told me it’s OK.” I said “There’s an alarm going out here in the hall and the street down below is is full of fire trucks. I think we need to go down the fire escape.” Neither one of us was sure where it was.
[NOTE to self and readers: ALWAYS find the fire escape the within five minutes of setting your bags down in a hotel room. Do not just identify it on a map: physically walk from your room to the door of the fire escape, and make it a point to remember how you got there, because you might have to do it in the dark.]
I walked back into the room and called the front desk. They said the fire was contained and things were under control — that we should stay in the room.
My firefighter friends will not stay above the second floor in any hotel or inn. Think they’re tryin’ to tell us something…
Wow, all of these stories are hair raising. I took a tour of Britain last year and we had three, COUNT ‘EM, THREE, fire alarms in the course of two weeks at three different hotels.
I blush to report that one of them was because of my husband who opened the bathroom door after a shower and the steam hit the sensor. Boy, was that embarrassing.
But, as we travel a lot, I’m going to take your advice about checking out fire escapes.
Holy mackerel! Three fire alarms would drive me to buy a tent. 🙂
LOL! The steam-generated fire alarm is all too common. Also, in my kitchen, the toaster-generated fire alarm.
And one more thing. I completely understand being rattled with a loud alarm going off, but I’m mystified also about not grabbing 1. the baby and 2. the dog. One would think instinct would have kicked in.
Baby first, for sure. Although if it was snowy outside, I can see how she would want to put her clothes on, or at least grab an overcoat on the way out. Not thinking about shoes is puzzling…maybe she grew up in California, where you rarely need shoes to go outside.
My husband left for Vietnam two days before our first child was born. I was staying with my mother and grandmother in an apartment over a store in a downtown of a Chicago suburb. One night I heard sirens and went to the front window to see people staring up at our building. Just then there was a pounding at the door and it was a fireman telling us to get out. He assisted my grandmother (in her 80’s). I ran into the bedroom I shared with my 3 month old son, grabbed him out of the crib and threw my purse over my shoulder on the way out. As I ran past my then-husband’s framed West Point degree, I thought I should grab that for him and then ran out. They never did figure out what caused the smoke (that’s all fortunately) but ever since then I’ve had a grab&go box for important papers.
Aw, that’s cool.
I’d be looking for another place to live after mysterious smoke materialized. How could you ever again sleep in peace in the place ?
My only hotel experience similar the any of the above occurred once in Nashville, TN several years ago. I was on a business trip and staying in a mid-range hotel near the airport. Colleagues were at a different hotel in the same area (we couldn’t all seem to find rooms in the same hotel that trip). At some point in the evening we lost power and an alarm went off. There was a tornado warning, and as this area had been hit with a tornado just the year before everyone was jumpy. This hotel (I think it was an Embassy Suites) hustled us out of our rooms to…well, wherever we wanted to hang out, I guess. They just wanted us out of our rooms.
They seemed to have no plan, so a lot of people just hung out in the bar. I went to the front desk to find out if they had anything to say about where we should be sheltering. I was quite familiar with tornado drills since I grew up in the Chicago area, and hanging out in big, open lobby with lots of glass around is NOT the approach one should take when a tornado is looming. (Nor is hanging out in a bar, for that matter.)
I asked if I could get some sort of light to go back to my room where I could at least shelter in the bathroom. But, no, they had nothing to give me. Since then I’ve learned to carry a small flashlight during my travels.
My colleagues in the other major hotel (a Sheraton) said they were given light sticks (those little glow light sticks) and hustled to the basement. That’s the way to deal with a tornado warning! The tornado never hit the area, so we were all safe, although rather tired from losing some sleep.
More on the “grab the laptop” dilemma…our NY office was in World Financial Center, which is right next to where the World Trade Center was. The entire office was evacuated on 9/11/01 and no one was allowed back for a couple months. People left their laptops behind when they left the office (as they should have), BUT because we had automatic back up software running on everyone’s laptop there was very little data lost. There was an inventory challenge giving people equipment they could use, but people were still able to work from remote offices and telecommuting from home.
I’ve been thinking about that go-bag/box issue lately, too. I’ve been trying to get my earthquake kit together (or actually kits, since I’ll also keep one in the car), but I’m stumped as to where to place it in the house. What if I can’t get to that closet or space in the event of an actual earthquake? With tornadoes, it was really a impossible to plan for when/where they may hit, too, to the extent that it didn’t seem worthwhile to try to plan for it at all. Maybe I’m just over-thinking this….hmmm….