Fire Exit? Where?

It baffled me for almost 2.5 years. And yesterday it stunned me. India's so-called most admired company had a minor fire incident. 25-30 people were hospitalised. Luckily there were no fatalities.

But, sooner or later, one day someone will pay. The reason I say this is because of this weird system that Infosys has. It locks all the FIRE EXITS after 10:00 PM.

I never really cared to ask 'WHY', but it felt plain stupid to me. The reasoning I would like to put forward:
1.Like in all IT companies, there is always a sizeable IT junta working late hours. Blame this on the timezone or work pressure, I dont really care, but yes, there are quite a few people working their ass off and the last thing they have to worry about is whether the Fire Exit is locked or unlocked?
2. One cannot really predict when there would be a blaze. Can we? Parallely, we cannot predict the number of folks working late nights. So it is very possible that we have almost a complete floor working late night and the deligent security guy happily locks the Fire Exit, knowing as if there will NEVER be a fire that night.

The B10 building that caught fire was attached to the B11 building where i worked for almost 2 years. And this Fire Exit locking business happened all along. I am very sure, even yesterday the case must have been the same.

We are lucky enough not to have lost any Infoscion, but what we should really do is learn and keep the Fire Exits open all the time. The people who make the rules will never be in office till 11 PM, it is only the security folks and software developers like me that will be at risk. So time to consider and make a slight change.

Here is a link to the incident.