This is not a drill.....

05 November 2007, Monday - What the?!

All of a sudden, at about 3.45pm the siren went off and this came over the PA system. "This is not a drill. Please evacuate the building immediately!"

We were all very bewildered by the announcement and looked to our fire warden, Matt to check if this is part of our practice evacuation. He was as bewildered as us and said that he had not been notified that there's a drill so this must be for real. We were told to grab our bags and head for the stairs.

We were just a teeny bit anxious to our predicament as there was really a fire at the 13th floor a couple of weeks back. Something in the battery room caught fire / short circuited that day. Lori and Stephanie were early birds and were in the office by 5.30am and had to be evacuated when it happened.

After climbing down 12 flights of stairs, we arrived at the lift lobby and exited the building. We saw two fire engines at the foot of the building but no firemen in sight. Could they have gone up the building? As we were walking, we looked up and saw no smoke billowing from any of the windows / floors above.










When we got to our gathering spot at ANZ Square, we did a headcount. Apparently, the alarm had been going on for a while but it was only heard if you were in the lift lobby. Nothing was heard in any of the offices / suites! Luckily somebody was at the lift lobby and enquired about it. Only then did they "release" the alarm and sent it to the offices / suites. Then we also found out that only people from levels 12 and below were evacuated. Nobody from level 14 and above got out of the building. The siren didn't go off for them!














After about 20 minutes, we were allowed back into the office. Fortunately, there were no real fire incidents and nobody was hurt.

We had no answer as to what triggered the alarm or what caused the alarm to fail. But somebody better take a good look at the alarm system before we appear on the front page of AU newspapers....

Of Holloween and meetings...

31 Oct 2007, Wednesday - A non-event and a big event....

"Trick or treat!!!" goes the kids.... - this didn't happen here in AU. Holloween is not a big event here in BNE. Sure, the shopping centres and the supermart sells costumes and gears and lots of sweets and candies for this day but it is not as celebrated compared to people in the US.

Though it's not celebrated, my big boss still gave each an everyone of us.....










Thank you Lori!



And on this frightening day, we were also managing the registration for Suncorp's AGM meeting at the Brisbane Convention Centre. As it is one of the biggest meeting we have here in Brisbane, there were 8 of us doing registration, Kylie and Lori ushering and directing the attendees as well as an IT expert flown in from Sydney for the meeting. We all took a guess of the final number of visitors and shareholders attending the meeting. Kevin's guess was the closest and we had close to 500 attendees.

Since Terry, Kevin and Rach (Squabbron) were together again, the "squabbing" continued while the others remained clueless to our jokes and sniggers....

Thanks to Suncorp, we had lunch, finger food and drinks catered for us! It was definitely one of the best meetings I had attended. Their ham & cheese croissants are just heavenly and to die for... We even had the opportunity to have them when they were fresh out of the oven!

When things were quiet, Terry had given us some insights into some very sinful facts on:
1) 1 croissants = 12 slices of white bread

2) 1 Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnuts = 2.5 Big Macs....

Go figure... the next time you bite into any of the above, think about the amount of "actual food" that you are eating... lucky for me, they are neither my favourite nor first choice of food...