"Please calmly run for your lives"

On Thursday morning I woke up to an alarm and thought that morning had come way too early. It turned out not to be my alarm clock, and not to be morning. At four in the morning the building started shouting, and it said: "There is a fire. Please calmly run for your lives." So I grabbed my passport, my external harddrive with my photos, and the work laptop (because I am just that nice to my employer to save their property), put on some clothes and then calmly ran down the stairs (I live on the 9th floor) and stood outside with a lot of other people for an hour or so.

It luckily turned out to be a false alarm, so the building and the rest of my stuff, is still doing fine. While waiting around outside, I figured it might have been a good idea to bring all my banking stuff too. Trying to access my Japanese bank accounts without the proper papers may well be quite difficult. Accessing my Swedish bank without my current props would require physically going to Sweden.

While standing around waiting, I at least got to see some of my neighbors. It seems many work nights, so there were not that many people standing around. It was also a chance to see them without heavy layers of makeup, since most people were standing around in their pajamas.

While waiting, I e-mailed a friend and explained that I had "避難" (evacuated) because my house had a "火事" (fire). When I was allowed back into my apartment, I was not very sleepy so I decided to do the hip thing and update Facebook and Twitter about my daily life. Then I wrote "家事です。落ち着いて非難しなさい" instead of "火事です。落ち着いて避難しなさい", which reads the same but means something very different. I blame being very tired and the stupid kanji prediction of Windows (my cellphone defaulted to the correct kanji) since I have never used the word 非難 but have used 避難 many times and would expect it to default to that (excuses excuses...). So instead of "The house is on fire, run for your lives" it became "Housework is ongoing, make sure you complain"... Though since the fire alarm is only spoken Japanese, and since there was no fire, I guess it could be that it was warning us about housework.