I don’t mean to cause alarm, so I will start off with the conclusion that Whitman students and staff are perfectly safe. They’re just inexplicably inconvenienced simply because Whitman’s fire alarm system seems to be held together with duct tape.

I will admit that fire drills are necessary, and the fact that Whitman is required to have ten of them per year does make me feel safer. But on the flipside, the un-mandated test runs—the couple of hours of kindhearted, blaring, disembodied warnings—that we’re supposed to ignore are frankly quite irksome.

Besides being extremely disruptive, each successive sounding of the alarm somehow gets funnier and funnier to us immature students. Hilarity and a significantly fragmented class period ensues each and every time.

Principal Alan Goodwin said that some of the tests are routine, but others are due to issues such as resetting a troublesome alarm or low water pressure. Essentially, our precious time that we as students cherish so much is sliced due to an old system that has issues in need of addressing.

A few other gripes come to mind when I hear the false alarm. For starters, the very concept of somebody interrupting on the loudspeaker only to tell me to ignore a system that’s meant to save my life definitely eats away at my common sense. I’m not totally comfortable with somebody yelling “Ignore anybody that yells fire!” in a crowded theater…er…school.

Second, what happens if there is a fire while the fire alarm is being tested? The odds are definitely small, but that’s no excuse. Finding the fire, reporting it to the office and announcing it to students would all be necessary before anybody would know to leave the building. Even then, it’s a ‘boy who cried wolf’ situation.

And on the subject of coordination and general awareness, as Goodwin points out, the issue with the fire alarm system for many years has been the disjunction between the two parts of the school; the main building and Whittier Woods. Each has a separate alarm system that needs to be individually triggered.

Math teacher Michelle Holloway and Social Studies teacher Sheryl Freedman also expressed annoyance about the inconvenience of the Whittier Woods system. Freedman even said that occasionally, poor Whittier Woods teachers will be stuck hearing an alarm capable of bursting an eardrum, which the main building is blissfully unaware of.

Holloway, Goodwin and Building Services Manager Frank Gross agreed that the system is just a bit old. But this is a motif that shouldn’t be taken so lightly.

“It’s quite safe. It’s quite effective. It’s just outdated,” Gross said.

VCR players are quite safe. In fact, they’re quite effective. I could watch movies in that format with sporadic glitches, but the technology has improved and I prefer the less outdated DVD player.

True, these questionably frequent tests may ensure safety. But the fact that the fire alarms require constant maintenance means that they don’t fit the definition of a properly functioning system.

I suggest the school invest a bit more time and money into this issue, because if left unattended, an old system might turn ancient and a slightly alarming issue might turn into a burning one.