Trails: False Alarm

So I'm at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California. A tradition of Worldcons is the wee-hours fire alarm that rousts everyone out onto the street in their pajamas. It can be almost fun, in a weird camaraderie-of-the-trenches way, to be rousted out onto the street in your pajamas with all the shining lights of your literary genre and a goodly number of one-liner-proficient fen. But in my experience it has never coincided with another tradition of Worldcons, which is the all-nighter. This time, however, I happened to be (still) up, even fairly conscious, in the lobby of the hotel when the alarm went off. Ah-hah! A jump on all those pajamaed, groggy, rousted pros and fen! For once I could enjoy the camaraderie of the rousted without skulking in potentially embarrassing pajamatude and inevitably embarrassing groggitude.

Alas, it was not to be. The only person who emerged from the hotel to where I was standing after seeing someone off into an airport-bound taxi was the convention ops manager who was on duty, vociferously expressing the hope that there was not, in fact, a fire on his watch.

A cute fireman did wave to me through the glass doors in back as he came through, though.