Where are the Emergency Exits?

Last week, my team moved into a new building. When I returned to the office from my weeks-long PTO, I was lost. I parked in the wrong lot, so I had to walk what felt like miles and cut through another building to reach this one. Once inside, I traversed the maze. I felt like a child on the first day of middle school. Bodies slipped past me, walking in a measured, trance-like state to typical office obligations, meetings, coffee breaks, etc. I noted where the snacks were, to the right of the exit to campus.

The stairs were much more narrow than the stairs in my old building. This concerned me because in case of an emergency, the stairs could get quite crowded. But maybe there was an emergency exit? When I had free time, I had to find it.

I settled in quickly. I liked the deals, which could be moved up or down with a button press. I would get lost often, until I realized the building was like a horizontal line. It only went in two directions, so if the bathroom wasn’t one way, it was the other. With this piece of information, I constructed my mental map. Bathroom, pantry, team seating, all in a row.

But I still haven’t found the emergency exits. It’s there on the physical map, but not the mental map. It was my mom who always reminded me to look for exits when entering a public space. I held onto this idea and the latent sense of dread it invoked. What was the emergency I was waiting for? Fires, flooding, and, being an American, a shooting.

This sense of dread that comes from being in a crowded space may be a uniquely American trait. In a large crowd, who can I trust to be normal? Who is the one looking at me with hatred, who is the one plotting? Emergencies can happen anywhere, but there is a certain kind of emergency that happens most often in America, one that we have grown numb to, even when children die and families are broken forever.

I try not to think about these things because it makes me angry. I search for emergency exits as a form of comfort. At Brown University, 2 students died in a lecture hall when a shooter armed with a rifle opened fire. Final exam review was happening at the time. Many students escaped via exit doors scattered in the room. Not long ago, I was a student sitting in crowded lecture rooms, observing the surroundings. Looking for exits. I guess this is all I can do. I am still looking for the exits.