"Attention! Attention! An emergency has been reported in the building! All occupants are advised to vacate the building immediately! Do not use the elevators, use the stairs! Repeat! Do not use the elevators, use the stairs! Calmly wait in the lobby of the building for the fire department! Attention! Attention! An emergency has been reported in the building...". This was accompanied by a very loud wailing siren and flashing white lights. The lights were for the hearing impaired, the blast of noise was for the visually impaired. The emergencies were almost always the result of the intelligently-impaired. Almost every week some idiot burned some food on/in their stove and instead of opening the sliding glass doors to their balconies, they would open their front doors that lead to the halls. The halls all had very sensitive smoke detectors installed in the ceilings and when the smoke from the burned food was detected, the fire system for the entire building was activated, the flashing/strobe lights would start, the loud recorded voice would begin intoning its message of impending doom and one would be violently jarred out of bed or the shower or whatever calm activity one had been engaged in before the excitement began.
We had many immigrants living there and far too numerous mentally ill folks. All the Russian immigrants on my floor were very sweet even though they didn't speak a word of English. They smiled at me as their visiting grandchildren gamboled around them like a litter of enthusiastic puppies. The Russian immigrants cooked some very ... umm... "interesting" food. I'm sure that to them, the food was wonderfully delicious but to some of the rest of us it was a trial to walk down the hall to our apartments sometimes. Smells reminiscent of boiled socks in brine or fried god-knows-what in hot oil would waft from their apartments and hit you full in the face as you got off the elevator. I would cover my face with my t-shirt only if the sweet little Russian folks weren't standing around in the hall. I didn't want to hurt their feelings. They probably thought our food smelled terrible, as well! I usually took a deep breath as the elevator approached my floor and only let it out after I had scurried to my apartment and shut the door behind me.
The Russians never set off the fire alarm. At least not on my floor. No, it was usually this perpetually drunk guy three doors down from my apartment. He was an old hippy and spent his days trying to sell people worthless junk he had been seen pulling out of the dumpsters behind our building and the nearby Value Village. He was nice enough but he got on my nerves because he was always trying to sell me stuff that had been mine, before I put it in the community room for anyone else who might want it! He must've dropped too much acid back in the day because he always saw me taking things out of my apartment and setting them on the tables in the community room. He'd come knocking on my door several hours later with the items in his arms and ask me if I wanted to buy anything. After a while I got tired of telling him that the stuff he was trying to sell was stuff I'd just given away. When he rang my doorbell, I'd peer through the peephole and if I saw that it was him, I'd ignore him until he gave up and shuffled away to someone else's apartment. As far as I know, no one ever bought any of his "treasures", as he called them. When he wasn't digging through dumpsters or trying to sell me my discarded stuff, he was attempting to cook food and then falling asleep. The fire department had to be dispatched to Lake City House seven times in one week! Finally, the Seattle Housing Authority decided that tenants who were responsible for the repeat offenses of being stupid and setting off the system for the entire building would need to pay a hefty fine for each incident. This was the best policy they ever implemented and many of us wished that it had been established sooner. The repeat offenders were outraged, of course. They couldn't afford the $75 fine for each fire department visit! It wasn't fair! Everyone in public housing was there because they couldn't afford to live anywhere else! How awful! How cruel! Someone should march down to City Hall and demand an audience with the mayor! Those of us who didn't repeatedly burn something and open the door to the hallway were not sympathetic to these whiners. The Seattle Fire Department wasn't sympathetic either. Eventually, the whining died down and the worst offenders either learned how to respond to a burned dinner or had to find another place to live. Those fines could really add up.
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