The things movies are made of

My office is in the old part of the library. When I leave I go out one of the side entrances which means I go through a narrow staircase down into what feels like the bowels of the building--also known as the first floor. I was walking down the little staircase today when I heard this muffled mechanical voice, heard an alarm and saw a bright flashing light. In what felt like a nano-second, I heard the slamming of all the heavy doors around me: the one at the tops of the stairs that goes to the main floor of the building; the one to the right of the staircase that goes into the central part of the first floor; the one around the corner from the stairs that goes into the stacks area of the first floor; and the door I needed to go out to actually leave the building. And then I started hearing second and third alarms (muffled since they were going off on the floor above me) as people opened the emergency exits to leave the building.

Crap. The fire alarm was going off.

When the alarm goes off the magnets holding the doors, which I am pretty sure are fire doors, release and the doors slam shut. When four of them slam shut at the same time it makes a sickening "ker-thunk" sound. And when I heard that sound my first thought: "This is how horror movies start."

I have no clue if the doors lock when they close (but I will find out). After my initial "Oh shit, I'm going to die down here" thought to wore off, I got to the bottom of the stairs, saw the main exit door had closed but not latched... And breathed a sigh of relief.

Outside I found a colleague who had been in the building and asked, professionally, "Dude, what the fuck?"

As far we knew, there wasn't a drill planned so it was a real, albeit probably false, alarm. A couple of students standing next to us were speculating what had happened. The best theory? That the alarm goes off when they find someone looking at porn on the library computers. I really wanted to turn to them and say, "If that caused the alarms to go off, we would spend all day, every day out here." Instead I wandered off before I lost what little professionalism I had left.

It was a false alarm, by the way.