The official hotel for a conference I’m attending for work caught fire early this morning. Well, caught makes it sound passive. From all accounts I’ve been hearing, arson is suspected.
This particular conference is cursed. Last year, it was hit by a hurricane and cancelled last minute.
With this conference, there was a lot up in the air. Would the conference continue at some point and when?
Believe it or not, the most accurate way for me to keep tabs on what was happening was through Twitter.
There are a lot of people staying in a hotel. Things like fires are “exciting†things they can tweet about. So you’ll hear about every detail, evacuation, and when they let people back in.
This is why signs like this exist: 😉
![From http://ohyeahtotally.com/](http://lechicgeek.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/in-case-of-fire.jpg)
I was able to keep tabs on what was going on in terms of the hotel.
In terms of the conference, I received two emails within thirty seconds of each other.  The first one I received said the conference was on as planned, and the second one said the conference was cancelled until noon.
I didn’t know whether to trust that the one received thirty seconds later was the correct one, so I went back to twitter.
I saw people tweeting that they were about to go sightseeing and then found their event was “back on”.  A ha!  So the more recent email was the one saying the conference was on as planned.
Twitter has also been useful in other stressful situations.  When we were stuck without power for days, we were able to use my Kindle to check twitter for updates (without using much of its charge at all).
But remember. Â Evacuate first. Â Tweet later.