An Alarming Situation

Several weeks ago I was awakened by the worst noise imaginable. It wasn’t the vacuum cleaner, it wasn’t a police siren, and it wasn’t even the voice of Tyra Banks. It was the fire alarm in my apartment building.

Now this wasn’t some small time smoke alarm, this was the building-wide siren that gets triggered when someone drops an atomic bomb on the apartment complex or when Ryan Seacrest becomes the host of yet another television show. This was serious. It all started at four-thirty in the morning on a Saturday night. I had just drifted off after a long evening and then suddenly and without warning my brain was being pierced with a sonic assault that caused me more pain than any migraine I’ve ever experienced. I sat straight up in bed as quick as a bullet while simultaneously one of the cats turned itself inside out and ran straight into a wall, and the other shot upward and latched onto the popcorn ceiling.

I’m a rather cynical person, so through the noise I found myself questioning the authenticity of the emergency. In school when we had fire drills we were always taught to escape a potentially burning building in a quick and orderly fashion, however since I had been asleep just thirty seconds prior, I took more of a sluggish and confused approach to the evacuation. I swung my feet out of bed and sat for a moment while I rubbed my eyes. I wondered what might be on fire, I wondered if anyone was hurt., and most importantly I wondered if this was important enough for me to have to put on pants.

After wrestling with getting my trousers into place and locating a pair of sandals, I groggily stumbled out the door at the exact same time as the neighbor couple across the way. We exchanged puzzled looks and began to roam around the area to see if we could discover what all the fuss was about. Everything seemed in good shape. The tenants of the entire building were out of their homes in various states of disarray, yet nobody could identify what the emergency was. No one seemed to be injured, nothing had been damaged, and the mulch was definitely not on fire. After several minutes of walking around and being extremely annoyed by it all, my female neighbor decided to call the emergency hotline for the apartment and see if they had the answers we were seeking. After speaking with someone for several minutes and hanging up she informed the rest of us that she had to go through a call center in India. We knew right then that it was going to be a long night.

We sat in the parking lot for forty-five minutes listening to the siren wail and generally wishing for death. Soon after, a fire truck arrived on the scene. They strolled around the building and determined that nothing was on fire. Then they informed the crowd that they could not turn off the alarm as only the apartment maintenance crew had access to where the it was housed. They promptly drove off leaving us once again to contend with the racket on our own. By this time we had amassed a small group of people and spent several minutes getting to know each other, checking each other’s ears to make sure they weren’t bleeding from the noise, and speculating on the cause of the alarm. Some folks thought that maybe it was a prank while others suggested that perhaps there had been a fire but had been put out. I suspected that the alarm was triggered to create a mixer for the residents.

Eventually the maintenance crew arrived and was faced with an angry mob dressed in their pajamas. Had a lynch mob actually formed, we would have been the most comfortable lynch mob ever. The apartment employees managed to get the alarm turned off and my feeling of anxiety that had persisted for the entire hour finally went away. Our bonding experience was over and the group dispersed. As I was walking through the door into my apartment, the neighbors said something warm and truly heartfelt to me regarding the bonding experience that we had shared… I just couldn’t hear it since I had gone deaf from the alarm.

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