April 18, 2012, 11:07 a.m.

The Alarm That Cried Wolf

In the apartment building I live in, there is a policy to frequently test the fire alarm. If I am right, they test it monthly, and every year they test each unit's alarm individually. The testing is done so frequently that I have been conditioned just like the boy who cried wolf, by having heard approximately 150 fire alarms in the past 3 years always due to testing, to ignore them. No matter what. If I have 150 false positives and 0 true positives, you filter it out.

So what will happen the day the fire alarm is real? I will ignore it and burn to ash. Too much testing can be a bad thing.