3rd Time is a Charm

Today's entry might be a stretch in terms of technology, but it still seems worth writing about and I will do my best to point out the technology aspects of it all.

My family has been on vacation the last three days and getting some rest was certainly one of the objectives of our trip. Unfortunately, each of the 3 nights we were away, our sleep was interrupted by a middle of the night fire alarm. Yep, that is right 3 nights in a row!

On the first night the hotel did a good job communicating what was going on and what their guests should do as they struggled to make their way down the narrow stairway. The fact that the floor doors opened into the stairway blocking people's path until the traffic was merged, is a different story. We managed to make it down about half of the floors before the hotel PA announced an all-clear. After waiting a while for an elevator empty enough for my family, we made it back to our room.

On the second night, the alarms went off, but the hotel staff was not nearly as on the ball, but people started to evacuate even without the hotel telling folks what to do. We once again made our way down some of the stairs, but this time the all-clear seem to come from the folks on the stairway vs. the hotel itself.

The third night when the alarm went off, we were all in disbelief that it could actually happen three nights in a row and there was much more hesitancy to start the evacuation. Eventually, the evacuation did start (with prodding from the hotel), but we didn't get too far down the stairs before the all-clear came from crowd on the stairs.

Following a few hours of post-fire alarm sleep, I headed to the hotel's lobby to see if anyone could tell me what was going on. Was this some sort of test that was not going well? Was the warm weather somehow triggering false alarms, was there a real issue causing heat or smoke somewhere in the hotel?

Of course it was none of those reasons. Instead, our sleep and our vacation was being plagued by a "practical joker" who somehow thought it "funny" to pull a fire alarm in the middle of the night.

The hotel offered us a free breakfast and a late check-out (but only because we asked for an explanation, not in any sort of blanket manner), which didn't really make up for the interruptions.

Bringing this whole discussion back to technology let's look at our practical joker. How could anyone think they could pull a fire alarm in a commercial building and not get the act caught on video. I thought this type of stunt went the way of crank phone calls with the advent of caller-ID.

One also has to ask why it took 3 times for the hotel to finally catch the perpetrator. The perpetrator was thrown of the hotel and turned over to the police, but still why did it take so long to shut down this joker?

In addition to the hotel taking so long to catch the person, I also have to question the communication processes of the hotel in dealing with its guests. While everyone at the hotel was aware of the situation and empathetic to those who brought it up, they did nothing to pro-actively deal with the situation during or after the false alarms.

I am sure they were hoping that most people would just deal with it and maybe the number of guests who were impacted all three nights was low, but in today's connected world they need to do a much better job of communicating or their guests will do the communicating for them via the various social networking outlets.

I am not going to name the hotel or the city, but I am not so sure others will be so generous. So the message here is to make sure you communicate, communicate, communicate so you control the message because while this practical joker got away with it twice before getting caught, your business might not be so charmed.