I work for a major academic health system, which is to say I spend a lot of my time in hospitals. During this Covid pandemic, I serve as a Public Information Officer in our Incident Command Center once per week. The Command Center is what you’d imagine: a war room with large monitors, phones, senior leaders and support staff, and lots of whiteboards upon which are scribbled important daily updates. Across the hall from the Command Center is a newly renovated, yet only partially occupied, suite for pediatric heart care. I prefer to use the restrooms in that area because they are isolated luxury suites vast enough to pitch a tent in. But they are designed for patients, so each restroom has one of those emergency panels with a pull cord and call button should the patient, you know, encounter some sort of trouble while answering the call.
That emergency panel, for me, is about elbow height. I think you know what happens next. I apparently accidentally tripped the emergency alarm while standing there but didn’t know it. Next thing I know, as I’m washing my hands and whistling a tune, people start frantically banging on the locked door asking me if I’m okay! Apparently the sound of the rushing faucet water had been drowning out the bells and sirens that I had inadvertently set off.
“Yeah, fine,” I say, clearly puzzled and annoyed. “Why?”
“You set off the alarm!”
”Um, no I didn’t,” I shouted back through the thick door. I turned off the faucet and heard the sirens and bells as I dried my hands.
When I exited the restroom, the hospital hallway was filled with concerned faculty, staff, first responders, and some of my Command Center colleagues, all very, very worried because a loud emergency alarm was reverberating throughout that side of the hospital, and it was coming from the bathroom. I learned that we have some eager first responders who take alarms seriously, as you might expect. Sheepishly, as I stared at the concerned faces in the hallway, I said, “Wow, so sorry. I’m not even sure how I did that. I never pulled the cord or pushed a button.”
Someone in the crowd yelled accusingly, “Well, you must have pulled the cord, the alarm is going off!”
Right at that moment a man’s voice boomed through the intercom in the bathroom I had just vacated: “Are you okay in there? Please respond!” I had to go back in and say it was an accident. A woman, maybe a nurse, was standing in the doorway holding open the door, and now many folks were looking in on me, all rubberneckers gawking as if they had come upon a highway auto accident. Collectively they shouted to the man in the box, “Please turn off the alarm! It was an accident!”
“An accident?” he screamed back. “You mean someone’s had an accident?”
“No,” said the throng. “The guy using the bathroom didn’t mean to pull the alarm!”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I defended myself to the angry mob. “I swear, I didn’t pull it. I didn’t do anything! I’m innocent in this matter!”
Nobody believed me. To them, some evil prankster had tripped the alarm. As I left the bathroom and walked down the hallway, people to my left and right gave me the stink eye as I passed them, legitimately mad at me. I wanted to shield my face from the angry horde like a suspect leaving the courthouse in handcuffs.