On the subject of fire alarms, when I was younger my family took a vacation to the big island of Hawaii. During our vacation, a rather intimidating hurricane took dead-aim at us (this was a few years after another huge hurricane hit the island, when all the Jurrasic Park crew was on the island). Obviously, given the recent event, and given what was about to happen, the staff was all a bit shaky and on edge. For like three nights in a row all the hotel customers practiced the emergency evacuation (into the "underground tunnels," or something; made no sense to me). We were all terrified. The night before the hurricane was supposed to hit, the emergency alarms went off. My grandfather jumped out of bed, turned his body to the right, and sprinted toward the door... and directly into the wall four feet away. He fell onto the ground, and by the time anyone noticed, we heard hotel staff running down the hallways yelling "false alarm!" The night the storm was supposed to hit, it took a 45 degree turn and missed us at the last second. That's my fire alarm story.
There have only been 2 fire alarms that I've found to be 100% successful. The first was in a school for the deaf. It was just outside Trenton, Ontario, in a place called Bellevue. I was one of about 100 Air Cadets on our glider pilot course over the summer, and they housed us in the deaf school as it was closer to the airfield than the local Air Force base. The first time fire alarm went off, it scared the ever-loving shit out of me. The entire place was filled with strobe lights, red rotating lights, and bells/sirens that were so loud you could FEEL them. It was a system designed to alert deaf kids, and I have no doubt that it was successful. The second one was in a computer room. It was an old-school mainframe underground server room which was the entire 20,000 square foot floor. Think old-school, like spinning reel-to-reel data storage, loud dot matrix printers, etc. Ever see the Andromeda Strain? Yeah, that kind of shit. Back then, they found this cool substance that bonds with oxygen and makes it not-oxygen, called Halon. The concept was that this was better at putting out a fire in a computer room because there was no residue like chemical extinguishers, and no water that would fry and ruin all the computer gear. Instead, it was a gas that just eliminated one of the key ingredients that fire needs to survive. Except that they seemed to forget the fact that air-breathing people worked in those server rooms. As such, you do NOT want to be in a Halon saturated environment. So, when a fire alarm went off in the server room, there was a 20 second "warning stage" that pretty well meant "you have 20 seconds to live unless you can make it out of the area through one of the fire doors, or can hold your breath for 60 seconds". To help alert to this, all the bright-white lights in the room would go out and be replaced by flashing red warning lights, and a loud air raid siren type thing would go off. I'm not sure if it was just the lights and alarm that made it effective, or the fact that there was a "you're going to die" thing thrown in there... but it worked pretty well. I know that the one time we had an unscheduled fire alarm test, all of the server operators freaked out, looked at each other with eyes bugging out in fear, and hauled ass out through the doors, knocking people out of the way. There were a couple of sprained ankles, and very much a "me or you" mob mentality.
I fucking hate these. I go to RIT, which has a significant deaf population, and the fire alarms in the mother fucking dorms are awful. You'll probably have to apply to the deaf part of the college after hearing those a few times.