Fire drill

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown The fire-drill, known to parents of toddlers around the turn of the millennium, such as the JC, as a “2319”. The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Fire drill
/ˈfʌɪə drɪl/ (n.)
1. Management: That unexpected catastrophe that is certain to bugger up your weekend.

It will start with clear and present danger (albeit apprehended through the foggy beer goggles of war, confusion and miscommunication from panicked people in ops); it will gradually suck in more and more people across the organisation (legal, litigation, compliance, senior relationship management) to a point where:

(a) it becomes so large that the combined mass of important people involved creates a Schwarzschild radius and it collapses in on itself (the “Bang scenario”) or

(b) it becomes so dispersed, and its entropy so great, that it fizzles out towards some kind of boredom heat death as it becomes clear that none of the legal terms so patiently negotiated, the firmwide policies so compendiously documented nor basic common-sense so parsimoniously rationed, has any prospect of overriding the dictates of keeping the client happy (the “whimper scenario”).

As in so many avenues of modern life — well, mine, anyway — whimpers outnumber bangs by a proportion large enough to make a “whimper” all but certain, but yet not quite certain enough that the risk of a “bang” can safely be ignored from the get-go.

Even though — nay, because — they threaten our very existence, bangs are far more fun than whimpers, and dealing with them is fully life-affirming — unless, deep down, you know they are really just jumped-up little whimpers masquerading as bangs.

Which, of course, by immutable rotation of the heavenly dials, they will be.

So you have to go through the motions for nothing and the outcome — fire drills — are a regular part of commercial life.

Parents of toddlers in 2001, who thus have that splendid motion picture Monsters, Inc. burned on their brains, know a “bang-disguised-whimper” as a “2319”.

2. Office ennui (archaic, falling out of use in the “new normal”): An actual fire drill: the Friday afternoon clarion call over the Tannoys that declares all is well with the world — even the building’s fire alarms are working — and it is time for yon wildebeest to start their slow stampede for the exits.

Fire drills of this kind are a fun interruption to an all-hands conference call — especially one that is getting a bit tasty — as they function like a cold shower where everyone has to pause, fuming, for about four minutes while Patricia Hodge goes through her pre-recorded motions; intoning first that this is a drill, and you should all ignore what is about to happen and get on with your work; then that this isn’t a drill — the building is on fire, you must immediately leave without using the elevator or collecting your belongings; and then a reminder that what just happened was a drill, you were right to ignore it, but it is stopping being a drill now, so from now on you do have to pay attention, until the next time you are told don’t have to. Then the unhappy, passive-aggressive accord of the conference call can resume, and all that dissipated enmity can begin to build up again.

There is a story, passed now into folklore, that an in-house legal eagle at JPM and her favourite lawyer at Linklaters would frequently have conversations so discursive, wide-ranging and long that they would span both the JPMorgan fire drill, at 10:30 in the morning, and the Linklaters one, at four in the afternoon.

In any case, this kind of fire drill is, of course, usually followed by a fire drill in the first sense, meaning that despite all indications to the contrary your weekend is wrecked after all, and almost certainly on account of a damp squib.

Once a in a blue moon someone actually pushes the fire alarm button — or someone burning toast in the kitchen sets off the smoke alarm — and the whole building has to go through the motions of evacuating for real, with ceremonial fire wardens scuttling around behind them, searching up-turned paper recycling bins and janitorial cupboards for dawdlers who “might not have heard” the klaxon.

The post-Covid new normal, where getting employees to work at all is a job, and coaxing them into the office nigh impossible, presents a quandary: what happens to home workers during a real-life fire alarm? How are they supposed to know there is a fire drill? What are they supposed to do? Should they go and stand outside at a make-shift assembly point under the clothes line? Should someone put on a high-vis jacket and march round the loft inspecting it for errant children?

Eheu.

See also

• Twenty-three nineteen