Fire Hazards Making us all a little safer...

Author: ALEX BENEPE '09

One morning I awoke to my roommate frantically searching the room for his boots. Looking around the room, I realized mine were missing too. And they weren't in the hallway where we had left them. "Eh, maybe the custodians took them," I said groggily, not realizing that that would pose a problem when it came to actually waking up and walking around outside to some place, like class or something. Stupid fire safety rules, I thought to myself. How can a pair of boots on the side of the wall be a fire hazard, I thought? My roommate looked around in the halls. He returned to the room triumphantly with both pairs of boots. "They put them in the study," he said. Nonetheless, I was still peeved.

However, everything changed a week later when I woke up to the smell of smoke. Battell was on fire! I stumbled out into the hallway, determined to leave the building as quickly as possible, but no one was around. Looking down the hallway, I saw an insurmountable obstacle: a pair of skis leaning against the wall. Now, to a normal person, this might not present such a problem. But see, I have hallcentrophobia, fear of walking in the middle of the hallway. I always have to walk down the hall pressed as closely as I can to the wall. Even burning alive scares me less. The skis loomed before me menacingly. Luckily I had been part of a contortionist troupe for years and I was able to flatten myself and slide under the heavy metal barriers. I still didn't see any smoke but I smelled something awful burning.

I was sure I was in the clear before another behemoth blocked my path-a deadly pair of snow-boarding boots was lying on the floor. Luckily I am on the track team at Middlebury and made a running long jump over the boots, narrowly missing them as they viciously snapped upwards, attempting to entangle my feet. But before I could make my landing, disaster struck. A poster that had only been taped on THREE SIDES came flying off the wall and gave me not one but four really bad paper cuts. I stumbled to the floor, bleeding profusely.

Crawling down the hall, I was almost to the stairwell, when suddenly, I noticed that the coat rack removed from the weight room had found its way to Battell, and now hordes of clothes came flying off of it at me, like the ravenous avian beasts of Hitchcock's "The Birds." Flocking down upon me, they covered me in all manner of gross gym shorts and horribly unfashionable jackets. "Curse you, people who won't change in the locker room!," I cried out hopelessly, but to no avail. Silence now. No air to breath. Only the horrid oily tar taste creeping up my nostrils. Let it in. Let it fill your lungs. They were counting on you, and you blew it. Skinny, stealy fingers at my wrist. You're an angel. You're a saint. You're Mother Theresa. You're Elvis. You're a god. But no. It was just Officer Chris. Hoisting me up over his manly physique like a sack of potatoes, he dragged me from the flames. Except there were no flames, it was just another student, who had burned the popcorn in the microwave, again.

A week later there was a fire in the weight room. Apparently the guy who runs while singing with his headphones on had run so fast that the friction caused the treadmill to burst into flames. The flames spread, causing all the elipticals in the room to spontaneously combust when the temperature reached E.M.T. (Eliptical Melting Temperature). Luckily, everyone got out okay, thanks to the fact that those vicious attack-coats had been removed, even if it was almost at my expense. Now every time my boots get hoisted by custodians and my RAs harass me the second I put my snowboard down in the hall, I can only smile, thinking how much everyone cares about my safety.