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Don't panic
Hello Webheads.
About two weeks ago I started a new job at a cinema near to my university. Before all the people who got the job with me could start we had to sit through two eight hour days of training and lectures. It was mind numbing, I could physically feel me body decaying as I sat in my chair listening to our team leader explaining what RICE stands for. Although to be fair we did get paid for it (and on a little side note, there was one girl who sat through all the training and then never turned up for work, and this got me thinking 'maybe she's a professional trainee,' maybe she goes to all these training days, gets paid for them and then moves on to the next. Not a bad idea if it works as they pay about £100 pounds a time.) Anyway, a sizable chunk of what we had to learn concerned fire safety and procedures; we had to learn where all the fire exits are, what to say to people when the fire alarm sounds, how to make sure the cinema is empty etc and etc. The main thing we learnt through all this was 'don't panic.'
'Don't panic,' that has always been a great a British reserve; our ability not to panic. Do you remember about five years ago when there was a bomb threat at Aintree race course? Everyone was told to evacuate and to remain calm, and they did, they calmly and slowly left the race course, almost oblivious to the fact that they could be killed any second.
Douglas Adams once wrote that the most important thing about interstellar travel are the two words 'Don't panic,' and like most writers of his genres, Douglas Adams was a prat. You see, I have always believed that our bodies do not do things to us that would put us in harm unless it is malfunctioning, so if our body is making us panic we are panicking for a reason. Do you remember all those needless fire drills we had to do at school? We had to get out the building in an organised fashion and not to run. Well fuck that, if I am in a building that is on fire I will get my own way out and I WILL be running.
Panicking is designed to get ourselves out of danger; I've come to the conclusion that staying calm often results in more danger than panicking does. Imagine if General Custer had panicked at the battle of Little Big horn, he might not have been laughed at two hundred years later by year eight history classes up and down the land. What if the captain of the Titanic had panicked when his ship got struck by an iceberg, I reckon a lot more lives would have been saved (actually I take issue with the whole Titanic disaster, have you been on a ferry recently and actually counted how many life boats there are? people say it was an atrocity that the ship didn't have enough life boats, they still don't! Ship companies are just better at covering it up nowadays.)
Of course, I'm not saying that panicking is always the right thing to do; I'd imagine that if you were coming up to a set of traffic lights that remaining calm would probably stand you in good stead. But I have just never understood why we all have to remain calm during a fire; wouldn't everyone get out quicker if they were just a little bit scared?
Kris
kristian_farnan@hotmail.com
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 bluewolfie
2005-04-14 02:17
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Mhm, a little bit scared is alright. I used to feel a bit excited during fire drills (almost the same emothion) because of getting out of the class I was in. But if everyone ran, someone would be trampled, an elderly lady, a young child, a half-asleep teenager. Encouraging the mass to stay calm means that if one in a hundred completely panics, the other 99 can calm them down and restore order. Ever been in a tuckshop with kids where there wasn't a line and the kids all crammed round it grabbing sweets and shoving money at the person in charge? That's what it would be like if people paniced. Everyone grabbing and someone getting hurt. People occasionally need rules to survive as a group.
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