Students and teachers across campus were starting late morning classes, on Jan. 7 when a somewhat confusing and very much unexpected message came over the Cisco IP phone intercoms. The audio message warned of the invasion of a Humoctopus that had entered the building, with the IP phone screen featuring a message and picture of the said Humoctopus.

The campus wide alert was the result of an attempt to test an emergency contact system, administered by Informational Technology (IT), intended to only go to between a limited number of phones in the IT department, a much smaller scaled test than that which occurred, so as to test the newly implemented system.

The message that went out across campus was a sampled "canned" or pre-recorded message that came with a software that provides this emergency alert service, which IT preferred not to be named for security issues. The college purchased this software from a vendor roughly a year ago, but this was the first real demonstration of the software on campus. Again, the test was intended to be administered on a much smaller scale.

In an interview with Jene Ladke, the Director of Campus Health, Safety, and Security, Ladke commented that "It [emergency message] will have a canned voice message as well as a text message. The system itself will have an audible message that you will hear and a text message that you will read."

Michael Klim, Director of Informational Technology on campus, commented that, "The best thing we would want to do is have some canned scripts so that in case of an emergency or if something is happening we can [hit a button] or even more importantly can say something in a way that won't cause panic. "

In relation to the Humoctopus message, Klim said, "Generally it's a very cool product, and the [software company] people have a kind of twisted sense of humor. .Normally what we do is when we do do the tests, we do a full-fledged system test, and we do it during the break when students and faculty aren't going to be bothered. Our protocol is to start the test with a voice announcement . and then we end it [with] 'This was a test,' so that [if] somebody comes into the middle of it they know it was a test and not to be worried."

This particular form of emergency alert will only come through on the Cisco IP digital phones across campus, and such a message was heard across campus on Wednesday. For other areas where these phones are not located, other forms of emergency alert will be implemented, either on or off campus.

"It can be kind of jarring," Klim says, "if you're sitting [in your class] and all of a sudden an announcement comes out, .so we are working on our scripts of how we utilize this so that the message is very clear and we probably won't we using canned ones from [the software]."

One other form of emergency alert is a text-messaging service, and although this service has been around and in use at EvCC for a while, it is being pushed for the next few months for more use because of its usefulness in an emergency situation. Concerning the text alerts, Michael Klim comments, "So important. .While you guys were on break, for those of us who had to work on campus that was the best way for us to find out whether or not the campus was open."

Anyone with a text-message capable cell phone can sign up for this emergency alert service by going to www.everettcc.edu/emergency.