Fire Alarms

Last week, the Respect Campaign hosted the Blood Donor Clinic and Remembrance Day. I showed up to donate blood for the clinic. I wasn't on duty so I didn't wear my vest, and I didn't drop my title once. At reception, I wanted to say "You know these people running your event? Yeeah, I'm their leader" but I didn't.

When waiting to give blood, I wound up sitting next to my Communications teacher whose class I got exempted from. I didn't recognize her though, because I was sitting in profile to her. I wound up having a conversation with a volunteer from my organization on the other side of her and she joined in. I had a whole conversation with her and only realized who she was after-the-fact.

Blood donations are really exclusive. You can't give blood if you're male and you've had sex with another man even once in your life. Someone  pointed out that if it's anal sex that's the issue, then women have that too sometimes, and that sex with another male doesn't necessarily mean anal. You can't give blood if your mother or grandmother is from Central America. You can't give blood if you've ever had sex with someone born in Africa. You can't give blood if you've ever had Malaria. The list goes on...

...And I'm not allowed to give blood.

The fire alarm went off when people were giving blood. I told the people around me "If I were an arsonist and wanted to hurt people, I would wait until a large number of people were in a room together, with people hooked up to machines so they couldn't evacuate immediately. I say there's a good chance this thing is legit." Then somebody ran up yelling "THIS IS NOT A DRILL. GET OUT OF THE BUILDING!"

Whatever it was, it was solved fast. The people who were giving blood weren't allowed to give it after their needle was removed, since you're not allowed to get needled twice in one day.

Later on, my house had the fire alarm go off while I was in the shower. Talk about having fire alarms go off at really inopportune times twice in one week.Turns out one of my roommates burnt some popcorn, and since our smoke alarm is connected directly to the fire station, we had firefighters in our house quickly.