Weird fears

Fire alarms. I've always hated loud noises, for as long as I can remember. I chalk it up to my Asperger's, but regardless of its source, my distaste for aural bombardment knows no bounds.

It's marginally more tolerable when there's a loud noise I can clearly identify and track, such as an approaching ambulance or police car with sirens blaring, or thunder following a clearly-visible flash of lightning. At least I have time to mentally prepare and/or cover my ears.

But fucking fire alarms scare the shit out of me every goddamn time they go off. This is to the point that when I was in grammar school as a child and all my classmates looked forward to fire drills as a means of escaping the doldrums of classroom education, I dreaded them with a visceral sort of sense-raping trepidation the likes of which I cannot remember ever being inspired in me by anything else. Fire drills, you see, were both loud and unpredictable, and that was a bad, bad combination. Worse still was when the principal announced that one would be taking place sometime today. I'm honestly surprised I never had to bolt to the bathroom and vomit from the terror. Forget ever being able to learn anything in class for the rest of that day, though.

When walking through the halls, regardless of whether there was a scheduled sensory torture session fire drill, I would involuntarily move away from the wall, put my head down, pretend to scratch an itch nearby my ear on the side of my head nearest the wall, etc, whenever I passed by an alarm klaxon. I don't know what regulations were for schools, but I swear they had more of those things than they really needed. Couldn't they have just let some of the students burn to death for lack of proper warning? I think it actually got to the point where I would involuntarily go temporarily deaf when passing by them as my brain tried to spare itself the potential agony of being caught in close proximity to the alarm klaxon when it went off. Whatever it was, I kinda zoned out enough to be completely oblivious, for those few seconds it took me to enter what my mind considered "close proximity," pass by the klaxon, and reach minimum safe distance again, to just about any visual or aural stimuli that may have been present. My friends would try to get my attention but damned if I could hear them. I only know because they've said on multiple occasions that I was periodically semi-catatonic and that they eventually figured out it was only in the halls, and only whenever we'd pass a klaxon.

Got worse in college in the dorms, where the alarms were easily 3x louder than in my high school and after one Halloween wherein the system malfunctioned after my nerves were already shot from a fight with my psychotic then-girlfriend. I was walking through the halls to pick up a pizza and was directly beneath one of the Ear Rape Modules when the damn things shorted out again and blared their panic signal far and wide. After that, if ever there were a time when man could finally have achieved to will himself to pass through solid matter, it would have been when I was walking through the halls past the ERMs. I was this close to sinking into the floor and coming up again on the other side of the ERM, physics be damned.

I know the devices only exist to save lives, but goddamn, do they have to be so loud? Or can't they at least "rev up" for a second or two before reaching full volume and intensity?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

SouthJag: I HATE that sound. That and some (not all) of the severe weather alert sounds that channels will play if there's a tornado or flood warning.

Goddamn, now my blood's running cold just thinking about it.

There's nowhere I can't reach.