My air raid siren story

copperbadge's recent adventures with fire in a subway station and the numerous tales of people ignoring fire alarms in the comments remind me of an anecdote:

Once upon a time--in the 80's--I attended an all-girls Catholic high school. (No, really.) One day, I was in class when an air raid siren went off. We all looked around at each other with WTF? clearly written on our faces. This wasn't the fire alarm. The fire alarm we knew, and we knew what to do--go outside immediately. This was something completely outside the realm of our experience--except in old movies about WWII. How were we supposed to react to that? Go outside? Find the nearest bomb shelter? It was our parents' generation who'd been conditioned to "duck and cover", not us.

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Update: gehayi has topped me once again. Go read about the time the factory she worked in caught fire.