I find it odd how a small misunderstanding can quickly turn a person paranoic, and then lead to chaos. Well, at least this is what happened to my class years ago. We were in the middle of music class when we heard the deafening lockdown drill alarms. We all immediately sprinted to the room where the instruments were kept. I can’t remember why, but for some reason the class was not complete, meaning that some students were somewhere else. Once we were all together, we realized that Mr. Machicao was not with us. As time passed by, panic started to take over as we noticed that this drill was taking a little longer than usual… What if this wasn’t a drill? What if it was a real emergency? Did we really hear the word “drill” in the announcement? These questions started to consume our thoughts. The fright we all felt, I can vividly remember it to this day.
We were probably there for like 10 minutes, but to us it felt like eternity. No one wanted to leave the room to confirm that we were in fact under attack. Finding out was not worth taking the risk. Oddly, we never heard the “drill is over” speech. Maybe that room was soundproof, or we were just too confused to pay attention to it. As a team, we came up with the brilliant idea of outsmarting the supposed villains who we thought had entered the school. Our plan was to turn off the lights, lock the door, and be completely silent. Although this is what is usually done in drills, we were never really mindful of it nor did we take it too seriously. But at this precise moment, the thought of our lives being at stake turned our survival mode on. At that point some of us started praying as our short lives flashed before our eyes. We tried to listen to anything that might signal activity outside, but there was only dead silence.
Probably because of the adrenaline, I don’t recall in detail what happened next. Maybe a student was brave enough and went out of the room or someone came to us, but we ended up realizing that the whole thing was simply a drill and that we had successfully survived. The collective terror we felt has scarred us for life. Since then, we take drills very seriously.
