Had some excitement at church this morning. Was out in the gathering space (fancy name for huge foyer area) checking to make sure the volume was up high enough so people out there could hear when I heard this beep...beep...beep...

Hmm.

Grabbed my father. Dragged him out there. Asked him if he heard it too.

He listened for a bit... yes, yes he did.

Uh oh.

So we went trucking towards the source of the sound, which seemed to be coming from the part of the church that opens up into the Hall (area for wedding receptions, chicken dinners, bingo and the like). It kept getting louder. Beep... BEEP... BEEP! We grabbed the music director on the way, as she was walking by and has keys for everything. The sound kept getting louder as we three headed towards the school. Was that the fire alarm? Was the school on fire? Were we going to have to evacuate a good 1500 people in the church?

We got through the last door into the school and found adults leading what looked like 1st graders out the door. Just a drill, they said.

Just a drill? What the heck were they thinking, just a drill? Could it have occurred to them to warn us that they'd be conducting a fire drill during church? Could they maybe have bumped the thing back a lousy 30 minutes to avoid all this in the first place? I could have strangled somebody. Who knows what sort of panic that could have set off. Think, people, think. *sigh*

Although in hindsight, it's a little scary that the gathering space was full of people who didn't want to be in the main sanctuary for some reason (small children and the like) and no one came in to tell any of us about the alarm.

When you usher in a large parish, you get used to things happening. We haven't had somebody go down in a few weeks, but we're always prepared to have to call the local Finest to come out and save the day. We have EMTs come to visit several times a year. Fainting is the most common, but we've also had diabetic reactions and heart issues.

Scariest one ever (that I had anything to do with) was the poor Mexican woman who had come to church in a vain search for comfort... she couldn't reach her sick father in Mexico by telephone and was terrified he had died... she kept banging her head against the wall and asking God to take her instead of her father...