The fire alarm gets pulled so often where I go that we play the game of "It's just some asshole or is this an actual fire"
Yeah, it's sort of a similar situation here -- except I tend to assume that any alarms that aren't real fires are instead the result of someone smoking in the dorms or doing some other thing that they aren't supposed to do because
it makes the smoke detector go off. Which still falls under the category of "some asshole", but, you know, I'd like to believe people aren't pulling the alarm just for kicks. ...Unless it's one of those nights where the halls are filled to the brim with drunken party-goers. Then I guess that would be plausible.
In any case, the fire alarm has gone off so many times in the four and a half semesters that I've lived here -- that I have now trained myself to
not immediately exit the building when the alarm goes off, because, depending on the weather, that will often leave me
freezing to death in the cold -- especially if the alarm goes off at night and I'm only wearing PJ's. I'm now always certain to take a few seconds to make sure I'm wearing everything that I should in order to stay sufficiently warm outside. ...And I sometimes grab a water bottle, since I tend to get dehydrated really quickly. ....Aaaaand I like to open Pokemon Go on my phone and make sure the walking I'm about to do doesn't go to waste.
...Don't worry, this building is big enough that, even if it was a real fire, spending an extra 30 seconds inside really wouldn't put me in very much additional danger. :P
But yeah, it's always funny to hear the freshman complain about how many "fire drills" they're scheduling. Like, no, sweetie... there are only one or two drills per
year. Everything else? Those are all legit -- at least in the sense that they're all actual cases of the alarm trigger getting pulled or the smoke detector catching something, regardless of whether or not there's any actual danger. So, don't blame the faculty -- it's your fellow students who are to blame. And this will certainly not be the last time that some pothead's stupidity is the reason you had to be woken up and marched out into the freezing cold at 4AM. :D