Magus's Grimoire [Abridged]

I'm sitting around in the Albany-Rensselaer Amtrak station waiting around for my train to Syracuse (an exciting 4-hour wait which I'm now almost halfway through). Fortunately, the station has free wireless, and food that isn't completely sketchy (although, as I mentioned on Twitter, the hot cocoa, despite being made with real fresh milk and a cocoa powder mix tastes like sickeningly sweet ass. [No, not sweet-ass, xkcd.] Maybe it's something about "upstate" New York; the cocoa at the Syracuse station's Dunkin' Donuts tastes exactly the same.)

So at 16:23 the fire alarm went off in the train station. The response was impressive. Station personnel promptly and calmly urged people outside and cleared the area around the doors and the space where the fire trucks would pull up, made an announcement (hard to hear over the alarms), and went around informing people to exit. Someone then guided us across the street [stopping traffic for safety] to a building right there, which had a gym to get us out of the rain.

Fire response was fairly prompt, I'd estimate no more than 5 minutes from the alarm, although I didn't think to check my watch.

Total time until the All Clear came in under 20 minutes.

Sure broke up the monotony of sitting around in the station, though. I'm still not sure if it was a drill.