the.com/fire drill

means A rehearsed evacuation exercise, originally for actual fires, now more often a scheduled interruption everyone shuffles through without urgency — the term has also drifted into slang for any chaotic, scramble-to-fix-it-now situation at work.

from Straightforward compound: 'fire' plus 'drill' in its military sense of repeated practice meant to make a response automatic. Drills of this kind — soldiers practicing formations, sailors practicing emergency stations — predate fire drills specifically; schools and factories adopted the format in the industrial era as fires in crowded wooden buildings and theaters became a serious, recurring danger. The slang sense, 'a fire drill' meaning frantic last-minute scrambling, is a 20th-century workplace extension — the irony being that real fire drills are supposed to be calm and orderly, while the phrase now means the opposite.