Why do people make such a big deal out of people being startled of the fire alarm? Why do they pick on those people?
Hmm. They probably don’t understand why alarms might bother certain people. They probably aren’t bothered by them themselves.
A perfect example of me being “picked on” was in 5th grade. My MS has alarms in every room, and they always startled me when they went off. During months where we would usually have a fire drill, I would be nervous the whole day, except during lunch periods. When I tried to explain it to the school psychologist’s intern, she would say “remember the things you can control and the things you can’t control”. The thing I couldn’t control was when the fire drill happened. The thing I could control (at least she thought so), was whether I thought about it. Here’s the thing, you can’t easily control what you think about, and in my case, I couldn’t. Therefore, she was basically saying “deal with it”. I hate it when people don’t understand why I get startled by alarms, because it makes me feel like I have no one to talk to about it.
Overall, my guess of why she didn’t understand, is that she probably wasn’t bothered by the alarm herself, and she probably didn’t know how I had ideas of when fire drills might come.
I think a human factor plays into this greatly. People have great ignorance for those who suffer from any medical condition, from small to large. And instead of coping with the problem and understanding it, they choose to negate it and turn it into humor.