Friday, October 5, 2007

Our irrational fears

Yesterday I left the JKB exactly on the hour. I know this because as I opened the door to leave, a bell started sounding. I think that the bells in the JKB should sound a little less like fire/burglary alarms. It really made me jump.

It doesn't help that I have in intense fear of alarms and the things that set them off. This especially applies to those detector things that you walk through. Every time I enter the library, I pretty much have to close my eyes and run through the sensors if I intend to get past the security guards. It's worse when I know I'm carrying around a pocket knife or something (I know they are not metal detectors, but just the same. . .) If I'm leaving a building and one of the doors has written on it that after hours, an alarm will sound, I'll use the other door. Even in the middle of day. Even if I saw someone walk out the door a second before. I think that I would probably never fly if I thought there was a reasonable alternative.

I think that this stems from an early childhood experience at the library where I unknowingly passed through one of these sensors into an area that seemingly had no exit. The alarm screamed for a few seconds and then stopped, and then I found myself stuck with my contraband library book in an abandoned hallway. I didn't know what to do. If I walked through the passage, the alarm would sound again, but there was no way out. Eventually, a kind librarian showed up and rescued me, and now I find myself terrified of setting off alarms at every moment.

I guess it may seem irrational, but someday when I walk our of some grocery store with a forgotten pack of gum in the bottom of my cart, and as the alarm is set off, I get tackled and dragged off to prison, they perhaps you will understand. Meanwhile, I'll keep running through the entrance of the library.

2 comments:

mlh said...

I'm guilt-ridden. Don't think that I'm trying to avoid you. It just turns out that I'm awfully flaky lately. I'm super sorry about your paper.

Man o Steel said...

Yeah, I always have a small thrill of fear as I push open doors that say EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY and then say what hours in really small print. Why do they say ONLY if they have hours at which it isn't an emergency exit? I don't think they understand what only means. First couple of weeks I would actually stop and try to remember the difference between AM and PM before I walked through the door every time, I exited a building (I'm really slow at remembering it too). But now I just walk through nervously.