Fire Alarm
I awoke at 4:20am to the sound of an alarm that just wouldn’t go off. It was faint, as if it was coming from the alarm clock of the neighbor downstairs. Something caused me to get up and investigate.
I opened my bedroom door and saw a flashing stobe light, and heard a siren sounding from somewhere beneath me. I fumbled for my sneakers, and tried to remember my roommate’s name and the word for fire. Unable to remember either, I resorted to yelling, “Heeeeeeeeey! Hey! Hey!” Judson finally emerged and we headed downstairs to the living room of our apartment.
I’ve always been subconsciously aware of the fact that if there is ever a fire, we are screwed. The apartment is lovely, but there is only one way out (aside from jumping out of various windows), and that way is down a precarious flight of wooden stairs.
I paused at our apartment door, my hand on the doorknob and door, trying to sense if the other side of the door was burning in a sea of flames. Feeling no heat, I open the door to find….
A policeman. He asked if there was a fire in our apartment. I shook my head no. I figured all was well and that I should just go back to bed.
But wait. How the hell did the police get here so quickly? I went back downstairs and then outside the apartment, down the stairs, and outside to find out what exactly was going on. Who set off the alarm, and how long had it been going off?
Outside was the assistant manager of the restaurant beneath us. I asked him how long the alarm had been going off. “Twenty minutes,” he replied, nearly knocking me out with his drunken breath. I quickly figured out that an employee who was drunk and at his workplace five hours after it closed probably had something to do with the fire alarm.
The next day, the restaurant owner who’s been giving such a hard time apologized profusely. And ever since, the grouchy old man tries his best to brighten up whenever he sees me: “Hello, dear Jennifer!” “How are you today, Jennifer?” “Do you want me to close the door, Jennifer?”
And our landlord is going to install alarms that actually sound in our apartment.
I wish this had happened weeks ago.