The fire alarm in my building is old-fashioned, a raspy, obnoxious double tone, and if you listen for long enough it sounds like the drone of a bagpipe. I swear I could almost hear "Scotland the Brave" as I tried to get back to sleep last night, probably because I was really tired.

There was no fire, as the grumpy sergeant informed those of us standing on the sidewalk in our pajamas. I guess I'd be grumpy, too, if I had to go out into the chilly night because of some false alarm at 3 in the morning. Oh wait - I did.

Which gave me plenty of time to contemplate whether I should have taken the extra few seconds to grab my wallet on the way out. If the building had burned down, I'd be out the contents of my wallet and without identification; could those seconds have really made the difference between me getting out safely or not?

After they determined that there was no fire, we were allowed to go back inside, but the alarm didn't shut off for another 15 minutes. The interface designer in me is of the opinion that it shouldn't ever take that long to do something as simple as shutting off an alarm. Imagine my surprise when I came downstairs this morning to the sound of turn-signal clicks from the alarm box, a blinking light indicating that the alarm was, in fact, still going off silently.

I spent this morning at something called "benefits orientation" (or, more accurately, at the first half thereof), where I sat through two Powerpoint presentations on my various options for health insurance and retirement plans. While having said benefits is definitely cool, talking about them at length is generally not. The hot chocolate made it a little more worthwhile.

I had figured I was done with orientations when I stopped being a student. I guess the difference with this one was that I didn't get any free condoms.