At the Town Hall where I used to work, I was, for several years, a “designated officer” for the purposes of the Emergency Evacuation Procedure. When the alarm sounded, you had to run down to reception (they never did tell us where to go if reception was on fire) and collect a card with a particular task printed on it and a bright yellow tabard. There were several disadvantages of designation:- if you didn’t time it right and deliberately hang back to get “Task No. 8:- Using fireman’s lift, ensure all female staff under 25 are taken out of the building”, you’d have probably ended up with “Task No.5 – Find all suspicious-looking bombs and defuse them by cutting either the blue or yellow wire (good luck), then station yourself at the south-south-easterly footway access point, reference AP.9, to prevent the public entering the building”. Also, there were never any XL tabards. You actually needed XXXXL in winter when you were wearing a thick overcoat as well and everyone used to laugh while I struggled to don an item of clothing that had probably last been worn by one of the Seven Dwarves, whilst running round trying to borrow some wire-cutters and desperately wondering where south-south-easterly footway access point AP.9 was.

Nobody ever told you when the emergency (most often caused by a workman in the basement lighting a large cigar) was over, so you paced up and down for what seemed like hours trying to placate a growing (or, rather, growling) queue of impatient members of the public. Nor could you do sensible things like vital last-minute shopping while everyone was milling about by the War Memorial. It didn’t seem to matter if you went missing because nobody seemed to have the faintest idea what was going on and who was supposed to report that so-and-so was still in the toilet (“Sorry, they were quite busy from the sound of it and it didn’t seem appropriate to mention the word evacuation”) or out on a site visit or on holiday or standing at another Department’s specified assembly point.

And you didn’t get paid.