Another interesting feature of this workplace is the fire safety routines. All my co-workers agree that during our initial training period, we were told repeatedly that if a fire alarm was to go off, we must all immediately drop whatever we are doing and follow the green lines on the floor, which would lead us to the nearest fire exit. Sounds sensible enough. Then one day I thought about it and looked at the ground, and then suddenly it hit me.

What green lines?

I must have spent 10-15 minutes one morning trying to find where these green lines were. There’s plenty of yellow, white and grey lines all over the place but no green ones. This is not a very useful fire safety procedure. I guess if a fire alarm goes off I’ll just follow everyone else and hope for the best. Your chances in a fire seem very much dependent on where you’re working anyway.

[...] the true highlight of the fire alarm was finally discovering these legendary green lines. There’s two of them. They’re around 6ft long extending immediately in front of the fire exit door, so totally useless as a guide unless you happen to be standing right next to it, by which point it’s pretty obvious where the fire exit is anyway. The mind boggles at why they spent so much time training us about these fire exit green lines.