All fired up!

At the place where I worked, I was, for several years, a "designated officer" when an evacuation of the building happened to become necessary for whatever reason. There was a set procedure when the alarm sounded. You had to run down to reception (they never did tell us where to go if reception was on fire) and collect: (1) a little card with a particular task printed on it, and (2) a bright yellow tabard. There were several disadvantages to being selected for this job:- if you didn't time it right and purposely hung back to get 'Task No. 8 - Using fireman's lift, ensure all decent looking typists are taken out of the building then take the best one out for a roistering good time', you’d have probably ended up with ‘Task No.5 – Find all suspicious-looking bombs and defuse them by cutting either the blue or yellow wire [good luck with the choice], then station yourself at the south-south-easterly footway access point, reference AP.9, to prevent the public entering’. Also, there were never any XL tabards (you needed XXXXL in winter when you were wearing a thick overcoat as well and everyone used to laugh while I struggled to don an item of clothing (luminous to boot) that had probably last been worn by one of the Seven Dwarves, whilst running round trying to borrow some wire-cutters and desperately wondering where south-south-easterly footway access point AP.9 was). And nobody ever told you when the emergency (most often caused by a workman in the basement smoking a large cigar) was over, so you paced up and down at the entrance to the rear car-park for several hours trying to placate a growing (I think I might mean growling) queue of foot-tapping members of the public. And you couldn’t do sensible things like vital last-minute shopping while everyone was milling about by the War Memorial. It didn’t seem to matter if you went missing because nobody seemed to have the faintest idea what was going on and who was supposed to report that so-and-so was still in the toilet (“Sorry, from the sound of it, they couldn’t be interrupted. Evacuation, though an entirely appropriate word in the circumstances, would have been taken out of context”) or out on a site visit or on holiday or standing in another Department’s specified assembly point. I could go on. And you didn’t get paid. Talk about unsung heroes!