Another imaginary fire incident

This posting concerns my lack of urgency when dealing with fire alarm systems, which did not help themselves tonight either.

I was awokened by one of my fire alarms at approximately 1:45AM this morning, and I had been drinking the prior evening and my head was extremely achey and woozy upon being alerted, and I was feeling generally non-appreciative for having my life saved ahead of time.

My first instinct was to pull a chair up to the alarm making all of the racket, which I found was just near the entrance door to the apartment. It disappointed me to a great degree to find that the alarm was not a wall-mounted discus-type device, but rather an building-integrated, inlaid, high-intensity speaker, which I imagined I could even poke with a large awl multiple times, and it would have no effect on ceasing the piercing noise.

After giving up on destroying the alarm, I began to consider if perhaps there was a fire in the building.

Impossible!

Even given my witnessing of a building being devoured by fire in the middle of the night in July of 2001, after being awokened in only my boxer shorts, by a police officer.

I decided to peek out of my front door peep hole to see if other people on my floor were having urgency. The drug dealing slacker who lives across the hall proceeded to walk the incorrect way, towards the side of the building that had no elevator, let alone stairs.

I decided to put my chair back where it came from. And then I decided that the balcony would be a good place to stand to watch for the firetrucks, which came approximately ten seconds after I took my new position. Well done, Burlington Fire Department!

I decided to hover close to the wall and hide from view, for fear that the fire department might see me, and ask me to leave the building. I went to the bedroom and applied long pajama pants, just in case the situation were to turn.

I wondered if I should go down to ground level and exit the building, and wait in the parking lot, where I could see some of the other residents accumulating. I wondered, if I did, should I pack Linus along in my loving arms, because that would surely make him thrilled.

I stopped wondering about escaping to safety, and took a pee instead. Now the alarm had been going for ten minutes and was making me feel ill. I decided to take a picture of the fire engine truck from my balcony, from such a spot where the firefighters could not spot me. It was a "no-look" photograph. That is the picture here.

After examining the picture on my camera, I decided that no firefighters were visible, and I might be able to poke my head out to better gauge the situation. There were about nine residents sitting on the curb, looking cold and bored, but SAFE.

At about this point, the fire chief's SUV left the premises, and the fire engine truck shut off its lights. I knew there was nothing to fear. But why was it taking so goddamn long to shut off the alarm, so that we could go back to sleep?

This gave me a chance to console Linus for almost five straight minutes, since he was being ravaged by the alarm in even more nerve-wracking ways than I was.

Anyways, during this time I thought about how I should write into my blog about how well I obey orders that were supposedly ingrained into my memory when I was in elementary school, about how I am supposed to have the utmost amounts of urgency when faced with screaming fire alarms, and about how I should leave buildings and school buses in the most complicated possible manners.

And after about twenty minutes, a blessed firefighter finally found the switch to the alarm, and prompted it into the OFF mode. And that is that.

Now it has begun to rain.

Thanks for trying, old bat who left their stove on before going to bed.