Quote Originally Posted by Ash View Post
We've been told that the alarm is faulty, and it is likely to go off again today. When it does we should stay put and not leave the building.

I was once awoken in the middle of the night by the fire alarm in the Sanderson Hotel; I had been on a business do and had been drinking heavily, so it took me a while to identify what the ear-splitting noise, fully awaken, dress, go out to the corridor to check if I could smell smoke, decide I'd better leave the building in case there was a head count and descend the stairs. I got to the pavement expecting to find hundreds of people and found no one. Not a soul. I could hear the fire alarm going off, but not a single person arrived. Eventually the noise stopped so I went back to bed. A couple of hours later I asked all my colleagues why they had ignored the alarm and they all claimed to have heard nothing, so I checked with reception who said they had no record of a fire alarm in the night.

I must have visited an alternate reality, I think. One of those parallel universes you hear so much about.