About an hour ago, I was jolted awake by this short burst of sound that I think was loud enough to liquefy at least part of my brain. I recognized it immediately as the fire alarm that is hard wired into the house. Not the nice civilized smoke detectors that say, "You know, don't hurry up from your tea or anything, but I think your toast might be burning. No, no...no need to panic...we're just letting you know with this lovely, lilting beep that you might want to consider that something is amiss." It was not that noise. It was a noise more akin to, "THIS IS YOUR LAST DAY ON EARTH GET OUT OF YOUR HOUSE NOW BEFORE THE ENTIRE WORLD COMES TO AN END RIGHT ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD GAAAAAHHHHHHH!" and then your ENTIRE brain liquefies and you die. And the caps are bigger. It was that sound. This alarm has only gone off once. It was this winter and we had made a very enthusiastic fire. It was the kind of enthusiasm that caused smoke to pour forth and no amount of newspaper flapping was going to divert it from every corner of the house. When this foghorn from hell started going off, Marc and I of looked at each other and wondered what kind of demon was possessing our home. We located the noise (an alarm we had never looked high up enough to see - we have delicate necks that don't respond well to craning) and did some MORE vigorous flapping along with a pathetic jump or two up towards the blooming thing and the noise eventually stopped. Kylie didn't come back into the house for hours or stop panting for days, so we thought, "Well, let's not do THAT again!" It was the opposite of fun.
So when that alarm interrupted a VERY IMPORTANT DREAM - I was in the midst of a tête-à-tête with Timothy Olyphant - I was annoyed. It was only a 3 second burst but enough to get my heart racing in a way that would indicate defibrillator pads needed to be employed. I lay there waiting for my heart to stop pounding - or just STOP (which took a while), rolled over, started to drift off, and the stupid thing went off AGAIN. I got out of bed, went out into the hallway, shook my fist at it a few times and said, "JUST SHUT UP ALREADY!" Kylie in the meantime was weaving around my ankles so I went to let her out as any noise like that usually ends up with her vomiting on my feet. As I was downstairs, the alarm went off two more times, and I knew sleep was futile. I went to our circuit breaker box and looked to see if anything would indicate I could cut power to the thing. Nothing. I went and stared really, REALLY hard at it. It went, "BLLLLARRRRRGGGHHHHAAAAAAA!!!!!" at me again. If this thing had a middle finger, it would have been rubbing it with glee into the middle of my forehead.
I called the non-emergency 911 number for Mountain View. The woman on the other end of the line sounded less than impressed about someone calling with a malfunctioning alarm. "Can't you just check to see if the battery is old?" she asked, I'm sure filing her nails and snapping her gum in boredom. I had this whole visual of how she looked that dated back to a wartime operator in the 1940's - sort of like this only less cheerful:
I'm fairly certain that is not what was on the other line, but it's what came to mind. I considered adding, "Oh, and my carotid artery is spewing blood!" just to get her attention, but what I really wanted was to go back to sleep.
I explained that we have VERY VAULTED ceilings and that there was just no way, despite my climbing prowess, that I was going to be able to reach up that high. She sighed and said, "Allllll riiiiiiight. I'll send out the firemen." I imagine that she rolled her eyes to her fellow operators as she connected my call.
The advantage of living so close to the firehouse is that they showed up in less than five minutes. I had a Claire Dunphy in Modern Family moment and wondered if I had enough time to change and put on my eyebrows, but I was distracted as the alarm went off two more times and then Kylie deposited her dinner into the ivy out back. Better there than my feet.
They sent out three firemen (all of whom were VERY good looking...and here I was in old sweats! Without so much as a swipe of lip gloss!) who all seemed rather bemused that this blond person with no discernible facial features couldn't deal with something so trivial as a fire alarm.
Long story short, the alarm didn't go off ONCE while they were here. NOT EVEN ONE TIME. The brought in a Very Large Ladder and went up to the alarm to have speaks with it - it remained silent. All the while I willed it to GO OFF, but it just smugly sat there, thinking, "I'll just bide my time and wait until they leave and she is just on the border of sleep..." It would appear that our system is just very, VERY old and they couldn't disable it, so after about 25 minutes of mucking about, the three of them said, "Well, good luck with that. Call an electrician in the morning." I did a very good job of not clinging to their ankles and saying, "TAKE ME BACK WITH YOU SO THAT I CAN GET SOME REST! I DON'T NORMALLY LOOK THIS WASHED OUT!" Instead I just forlornly watched as the Very Good Looking Men left. I let Kylie back into the house and now am shuttered away in my office, writing this to you.
Marc is, of course, out of town and not privy to all of this excitement. I think I'll give him a smidge of the experience when he gets home by pouring some ice water over his head around 3:30am. It's only fair. Or, does anyone have an air horn I could borrow?
2 comments:
First, you must be delerious because it's Saturday morning and not Sunday. Secondly, hot firemen require photos. Photos woman! I'll forgive you this one time because you were half asleep/half dead. Poor Kylie, our Mama Kitty is the same way. Our neighbor did us a favor to let the dogs out of the garage when we were in SF a couple of weeks ago, but accidentally set off the home security alarm. And since he didn't have a key to our house, it just went on, and on, and on, and on....with poor old, fat, and scared Mama Kitty trapped inside. The shrill piercing sound of this alarm can not be described. There are not enough words in our language to describe the horror that is this alarm. The sound is enough to wake the dead, cause your eardrums to burst, and leave you with partial deafness for days. We called our security company and asked if they could disable it remotely.
Unhelpful operator: "Ummm, no."
Us: "There isn't anything that we can do?"
Unhelpful operator: "It should go off in about 10 minutes or so. I think. Maybe."
Us: "OMG, not for 10 minutes?! Are you sure?"
Unhelpful operator: "Not really. Well, what I can do is not dispatch the police department which means you won't be fined for a false alarm."
I know exactly how you feel, Kuz! My house is 3 years old and has a smoke detector in EACH room, all of which require batteries and are hard-wired into the house. And the ceilings are 10-feet tall. All of this means that when one battery, JUST ONE OF THEM, dies, they all go off until you replace all 8 batteries. This has happened twice in the middle of the night. There must be a better way...
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