I woke up this morning at 4:30, earlier than I had to, because of a piercing chirp in my room. I grabbed my cell phone to silence the alarm … but it wasn’t my phone. I stumbled to the telephone on the desk, but it wasn’t ringing. My laptop was off, and I doubt it is even capable of such a racket. It took me a few minutes before I realized it was the fire alarm coming from the inobtrusive faceplate in the wall near the ceiling above the desk.

“Oh, shoot! Did I trip the fire alarm going for my phone?” There’s no way to trip the alarm from my room, and for the last time, my phone did not go off!

“Oh, but I knocked the bedside phone to the ground. Maybe after being off the hook so long the alarm went off?” You didn’t even knock the phone down until the alarm had already started, remember?! And what kind of safety mechanism sets off the fire alarm because you leave the phone off the hook? I picked it up anyway.

My mind is usually very coherent when I first wake up, but sometimes it’s funny how it works. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed out with Jessica until 3 in the morning.

Fire alarms are necessary evils. When one goes off everyone’s first thought is, “Is this for real?” Our whole lives we’ve done drills, people have pulled pranks, and sometimes they just malfunction.

I was walking around in the hall for about 2 minutes before someone else joined me and I had already stumbled around my room for at least 5. The view from the window gave no sign of danger, but the fire safe doors had me worried. They were cool to the touch and I slowly pushed them open only to reveal an empty hall just like ours.

Finally the alarm stopped. “I’m going to go down and find out what happened” said the other man in the hall.

Forget this … I’m going back to bed.

The alarm went off again 10 minutes later. It stopped before I could even make it out my front door.

I didn’t get out of bed again until noon.

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