I can sleep through a lot …..thunder storms, movies, trains, lectures, you name it- I can sleep through it. One exception to my bear like hibernation is the god awful fire alarm in my apartment. That fire alarm is a sound that makes me question every wrong thing I’ve done in my life that has lead me to deserve this suffering.
Now I usually don’t get this angry about fire alarms but I also haven’t been in a situation where fire alarms have woken me up from my sleeping at 4 a.m. on a Saturday night two weeks in a row!
The first incident was after a long night of Netflix and baking cookies with my roommate. I had finally fallen asleep around 1:30 when all too soon I hear:
“FIRE FIRE LEAVE IMMEDIATELY”
I just laid there for a minute questioning if I was really awake or not and then also weighing out the pros and cons of actually getting out of bed for this alarm.
Pros
-I will be safe from a potential fire
Cons
-I will have to get out of bed at 4 in the morning
-I will have to stand outside for who knows how long
-I will have to GET OUT OF BED at 4 in the morning
Sadly my roommate forced me up and out into the cold outdoors.
As all of us half asleep and/or still drunk zombies waited for public safety to arrive we concluded that there in fact was no fire, to which my roommate responded by groaning loudly, making her angry face at me and waving her arms aggressively. She promptly accepted her fate and sat on the ground.
Public safety FINALLY arrived after what felt like a very long, cold time and shut off the alarm. My roommate and I shuffled back into our apartment and as soon as my head hit the pillow:
“FIRE FIRE LEAVE IMMEDIATELY.”
I am not even joking, I went into shock, was this really happening again? Did I really have to put on pants one more time after I had just taken them off???
My roommate let out an angered scream, I rolled out of bed and we went back out the door.
Did we have to go back outside for that second alarm? Probably not but I heard this rumor that you get fined if you don’t leave the building during a fire alarm and I wasn’t taking any risks. Also the alarm is so loud if you can stay in the apartment while its happening and not want to rip your own ears off, you’re probably deaf.
My roommate and I were the only people to go back outside the second time so either I have better hearing than everyone in my building or they were willing to withstand Satan’s voice to not go outside.
The alarm went off 3 more times that night but I withstood the horrible sound because my roommate and I were pretty confident at that point that there was no fire. Or worst case scenario I’d have an excuse for not turning in my homework on Monday.
This past Saturday I thought I was having déjà vu when I woke up to “FIRE FIRE LEAVE IMMEDIATELY” and looked at my clock to see 4am! I was mad because I needed to find more layers to put on since it was cold but the fire alarm was still screaming at me to get out of the building. And as we went walk out the door my roommate grabbed her coat and whispered “I’m ready to kill.”
Public safety arrived faster this time and to our surprise began checking all the apartments. They soon discovered on of the apartments on the lower floor filled with smoke!
Despite all of us residents being sleepy and/or still drunk we all began trying to figure out
A.) who lives there
B.) are they okay
C.) what was on fire
D.) was there anything actually on fire?
We all quickly found out the answer to C.). One of the public safety officers pulled a smoking pot out of the building and dumped the scorched block of ramen noodles into the grass next to the door.
There was chorus of “are you kidding me?” and just about everyone rolled their eyes at the sad fact that someone had burnt their ramen noodles at 4 am on a Saturday night.
After 5 minutes of attempted smoke clearing we were all let back into our now smelly building. I’m not going to lie it was smelly before this but that weird smell was better than smelling burnt air every time I leave my apartment.
Moral of this story is please don’t cook anything flammable after 10 pm because if you burn it and wake up your entire building we will shame you.
