It started this morning, sitting at my desk I hear "beep beep beep". Hmm, sounded like a truck backing up with those warning beeps. 20 seconds later it starts again, and then again. My thought was, "If they keep backing up, pretty soon they will hit the building!"
Then as I started working the beeping faded. I became immersed in my calculations and freaking out over my non-reporducible results. But it never really went away.
After lunch the entire building was abuzz... what is the beeping, why won't it stop, who can make it stop, where is it coming from? We all wandered around aimlessly offering our very useful input, "I think it is coming from here!", "I think it is an alarm", "It is louder here", "Hey you can barely hear it in this office"... We also took random polls, "what time do you remember it starting", "is it getting louder?"
A friend of mine and I discovered it WAS coming from the service elevator, or at least we were pretty sure. The one that only is to be used for transporting goods and deliveries upstairs, but NOT for general use due to safety issues (?!?!?). We immediately thought that someone was trapped! I hesitatingly pressed the elevator button halfway expecting to get sprayed by invisible ink that won't wash off but is apparent under UV, so I could be identified at a later date as "the one that summoned the elevator". Much to our relief, no one was in fact, trapped in the elevator. Nor did pressing the button relieve us lab rats of this building from the incessant beeping.
Finally we were rescued from our aimless wanderings, comments and quizzing of each other when an admin arrived and took control of the situation. You see we scientists are evidently a pretty helpless bunch that require direction by the real people who run this place, an admin. She made a phone call and within about 15 minutes crafts arrived.
Crafts is apparently as a group, really just scientists without a computer or a lab. Instead their tools are wrenches and hammers. They took off where we scientists left off wandering the halls asking the.exact.same.questions as we scientists did. "Where is it coming from?" "What is it?" "Have you ever heard anything like this?"
The old long haired hippy crafts guy (who says the most inappropriate things and is completely useless) walked up and down the hall supervising and offering useless comments such as "they never trusted me with a key to the fire panel" and "about 15 years ago in the building four over from this one that is now torn down something like this happened" and "this building is so old they need to just tear it down so I can retire, but I can't until this building is gone since I am the only one who knows it".
Verrry helpful. In the meantime, stop the freaking beeping.
In the end... it wasn't the elevator. It was an emergency light that was not in existance (?!?!?!) whose battery had run low. They pushed a red button to bypass it and the beeping stopped.
All is well.
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