Burning Down The House

"Enter action with boldness." -Law 28, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

In the past 2-3 years, I've dealt with a major fire in my apartment community and person falling out of the second floor building of the house I manage. Today, I got to add another fire to my repertoire of emergency management experience. However, today was very different from the other two experiences.

My day started at approximately 6:30am, when I awoke to one of my RA's hovering over me. After the initial shock of someone being in my apartment, I was informed that one of the resident halls I am in charge of was on fire, and that I needed to get up. Apparently I was called several times via phone, but because I sleep with earplugs and had my phone on vibrate I obviously did not hear it.

Once I arrived to another residence hall where the residents of the smokey building were being corralled, I discovered the situation had been going on for about 1.5 hours before I got there and the initial protocol was already completed. Seeing that the people who were already there had things under control, I stepped back and helped where needed; e.g. keeping residents from leaving the secure area, gathering food/water/juice, and gathering blankets. After a few hours, I went with one of the RD's to assess some potential conduct concerns resulting from the building sweep that the fire marshall conducted; however, when I arrived, the the fire reignited. On top of that, I was informed that I needed to chaperon a trip to San Fran to visit the California Academy of Science. Although I really wanted to stay, considering one of my buildings was on fire, I figured that it was best that I went on the trip as I would not have been much help otherwise. I had a great time (considering I was working on about 3.5-4 hours of sleep), and really enjoyed the time with my RA's (Pictures below). After I got back from the trip, one of the RD's and I had to complete a lot of incident reports stemming from alcohol and contraband found in many resident's rooms. That means many more conduct meets...yay! Haha. From there, we grabbed a bite to eat at In-and-Out (which is really really delicious), and I continued working since I had Incident Reports to email, and a building meeting/inspection to schedule. So all in all I completed a 16 hour workday.

One thing that did rub me the wrong way, though, were the continual snarky/bossy comments I received during the morning. During a crisis situation, one should be a role model for everyone else. That means uplifting and supporting each other...not bringing people down with negativity and 'my situation is worse than your situation' comments. Some people are agitated enough when they first wake up in the morning (like me), so insulting them just 'adds insult to injury.' Regardless, I tried my best to access one of my apparent "Top 5 Strengths," positivity. "I can't eat those cereal bars because things that don't taste good make me sick"...blllleehhh

Cheers!