A more accurate description of today would have been Beat-my-head-on-the-desk Friday, but "facepalm" works better for brevity and alliteration. Anyway, today we had an emergency drill at work. (I'm not sure how this differs from the fire drill we just had last month, but that was just one of many problems with this particular exercise so we'll move on.) Drills are always odd because they don't usually want us to actually leave the building, just assemble to receive a reminder about the safety instructions, so it's usually not so much a drill as it is a brief meeting next to the emergency stairs. First there was an announcement over the building loudspeaker that they were starting the drill and that when we heard the alarm we were not supposed to evacuate, just assemble at the stairs and wait for further instructions. A few minutes later, one of the guys from the building management company (the university doesn't own the building, just rents the bottom six floors) arrived on the floor and started yelling for everyone to evacuate.

"We want you all to go down the stairs to get familiar with the staircase," he said. After he stopped yelling "Everyone needs to evacuate," obviously. (The alarm itself never went off, by the way.) So we grabbed our coats and bags and grumbled our way down the stairs, prepared to wait outside for whatever it is the building management needed to do.

We got down to the lobby to find more building management guys holding open the elevator door. "OK, that's it," they said. "Go on back up."

On the way up, I wondered out loud why we needed to become familiar with the staircase when we evacuate for false alarms at least as often as we have "drills." No one had a good answer.

The really sad part was that -- thanks to getting my lunch from a tasting with a new catering vendor -- the trek down the stairs was as close to the outside as I got all day, on the warmest day of the past two weeks and with more cold weather coming. At least the food was really good (and free).