Question:
do people actually get up quickly when the fire alarm goes off? I never did once I left school. Used to finish making a cup of tea to take with me when the alarm went off in the Nurses' Home, or the tea would get cold in the half hour we had to wait for the firefighters to turn up and say it was a false alarm...

Answer: I can think what fun it would be evacuating the MSS building at UMIST. It goes from B floor to Q floor (with no I floor for some reason although there is an O floor) and has lifts borrowed from NASA with doors sponsored by a vice [1] maufacturer. Of course the MSS building is where I have labs and all my tutors have their offices. At least computation has the bottom half of the building and the maths dept has the top. The views from Q floor are quite something though. The window next to the lifts looks across the centre of town and you can see the whole town centre. I just pity people who have to walk down 15 floors worth of stairs (30 or so flights) in the event of a fire. I suppose I should stop using the fire alarm test in my halls as an alarm clock. They test them at 11.00 am on Tuesdays and, yes, I am usually in bed or just about to get up then. I compensate for this by staying up very late at night (posting this at 2 am BST!).