All I got was this dumb stick sounds like it's rainin' -- how come you got a wife?
There is a reason I am refusing to sleep before 3:30 a.m. today.
Wednesday night (or very early Thursday morning, really), I am sleeping in my bed when a high, incessant noise begins to creep into my sleep and shake me out of it. I slap my alarm clock several times blearily to no avail -- it was the fire alarm. Again.
Let me explain that there was a rash of false fire alarms earlier in the year because people would take scalding showers and then open the bathroom door immediately, at which time the steam would set off the alarms. These grew to be increasingly aggravating, especially after the one at 7 a.m. However, I believed that everyone had finally gotten the idea of what not to do so that the whole building does not have to evacuate for one hot shower. I can assume I was right because according to the firemen and our residential college director (RCD), someone deliberately pulled that alarm. Needless to say, I was angry. I had to leave my comfortable bed in the early hours of the morning for some idiot prank.
This alone wouldn't be cause for anything terribly out of the ordinary. However, Thursday night, to our collective disbelief, there was another alarm, at almost exactly the same time. Consequently, we believed it to be another prank, but we were forced to leave the building once more and wait outside in the cold and the rain for twenty minutes until the firemen could come.
Apparently, this was not so. Something in the air conditioning machinery had locked up, and a belt had burned up, which could indeed have led to a more serious situation. Because of the previous false alarms, however, nobody took this one seriously (and who could blame us?). Some people, I've heard, even stayed in the building throughout the whole thing. That's the frightening part: that there really could have been a fire. And that people could have been hurt as the result of an idiotic prank's effects. So as angry as I was last night (very angry, I might add, in about four different languages), I was even angrier when I heard the whole story.
I couldn't help but think, sitting out there at night in the drizzling rain, "This is what going insane feels like." An exaggeration, but still.
There is only one small part of this situation that was somewhat amusing -- last night, the night with the plausible alarm, was the night that my floor had decorated for the Safe Trick or Treat activity planned for local children. Hence, there were a lot of dangling streamers, ghosts, and other such Halloween-esque things hanging from the ceiling tiles as well as a mat just inside the door to the stairs that screamed when stepped on. The black streamers were spaced and arranged so that you could literally not see more than two feet in front of you at any point along the hallway. I feel bad for the firemen who had to first come out at 3 in the morning, and then came upon our floor only to have to deal with cut-up trash bags hanging everywhere from the ceiling and annoying, screaming floormats.
When we came back up, a considerable number of the streamers were on the ground.
And I suppose that's all there is to say about that. Perhaps it's safe to sleep now.
Wednesday night (or very early Thursday morning, really), I am sleeping in my bed when a high, incessant noise begins to creep into my sleep and shake me out of it. I slap my alarm clock several times blearily to no avail -- it was the fire alarm. Again.
Let me explain that there was a rash of false fire alarms earlier in the year because people would take scalding showers and then open the bathroom door immediately, at which time the steam would set off the alarms. These grew to be increasingly aggravating, especially after the one at 7 a.m. However, I believed that everyone had finally gotten the idea of what not to do so that the whole building does not have to evacuate for one hot shower. I can assume I was right because according to the firemen and our residential college director (RCD), someone deliberately pulled that alarm. Needless to say, I was angry. I had to leave my comfortable bed in the early hours of the morning for some idiot prank.
This alone wouldn't be cause for anything terribly out of the ordinary. However, Thursday night, to our collective disbelief, there was another alarm, at almost exactly the same time. Consequently, we believed it to be another prank, but we were forced to leave the building once more and wait outside in the cold and the rain for twenty minutes until the firemen could come.
Apparently, this was not so. Something in the air conditioning machinery had locked up, and a belt had burned up, which could indeed have led to a more serious situation. Because of the previous false alarms, however, nobody took this one seriously (and who could blame us?). Some people, I've heard, even stayed in the building throughout the whole thing. That's the frightening part: that there really could have been a fire. And that people could have been hurt as the result of an idiotic prank's effects. So as angry as I was last night (very angry, I might add, in about four different languages), I was even angrier when I heard the whole story.
I couldn't help but think, sitting out there at night in the drizzling rain, "This is what going insane feels like." An exaggeration, but still.
There is only one small part of this situation that was somewhat amusing -- last night, the night with the plausible alarm, was the night that my floor had decorated for the Safe Trick or Treat activity planned for local children. Hence, there were a lot of dangling streamers, ghosts, and other such Halloween-esque things hanging from the ceiling tiles as well as a mat just inside the door to the stairs that screamed when stepped on. The black streamers were spaced and arranged so that you could literally not see more than two feet in front of you at any point along the hallway. I feel bad for the firemen who had to first come out at 3 in the morning, and then came upon our floor only to have to deal with cut-up trash bags hanging everywhere from the ceiling and annoying, screaming floormats.
When we came back up, a considerable number of the streamers were on the ground.
And I suppose that's all there is to say about that. Perhaps it's safe to sleep now.