There are some things in life so ridiculous that they demand instant blogging. Tonight was one of those nights.
So I'm at home, drinking apple juice out of a coffee cup and eating butter flavored Crispy Minis on a Sunday night (I wish I could say I was doing something cooler, but let's be honest), when all of a sudden I hear someone's fire alarm going off in another room. 'Ok,' I think to myself, 'my fire alarm goes off all the time'. So I leave it.
The alarm persists for fifteen minutes.
At this point, I can't possibly think of a reason that a fire alarm is going off for fifteen minutes at 11:00pm on a Sunday night unless something is wrong. I slowly start packing up my laptop and passport and glasses (in situations like this, I'm a little paranoid -- if the building is indeed going to burn down, in no way will I be caught unprepared for a proper getaway).
Five more minutes pass. I wander out in the hallway to check for signs of trouble, and find two seventy year old men listening at the door of the room beside me.
We feel the door, smell for smoke, knock loudly. Nothing. But the alarm going off inside won't stop, so one old man touches the handle and discovers that the door's unlocked.
Now it's starting to get creepy.
We back away, concluding that we're all staying out of there. And just as we decide to phone the police, an old lady bursts through the side stairwell in an absolute tizzy. She's wrapped in a faded blue night robe, her glasses perched on her nose and white hairs flying everywhere (I later learned her name is Louise).
"What the blazes is going on?" Louise demands.
"We don't know," the old men and I reply. "The door's open but the lights are off inside."
"Well I can smell smoke outside!" yelps Louise.
At this point I run back in my room and dart for the patio -- sure enough, when I get outside there's the strong smell of smoke gushing from the room right next to mine. Suddenly I hear Lousie's loud voice bellow, "GET UP YOU ASS! YOU'RE BURNING THE BUILDING DOWN!"
I run back to the other room -- by the time I get there, Louise has thrown a smoking steel pot into the kitchen sink and is now fanning the fire alarm. Her and the old men are pointing and screaming at a middle aged man who looks drunk and/or stoned out of his skull: "Don't you know you could have killed us?!", "What were you doing?!", "Are you out of your goddamn mind?!"
The guy was completely out of it, barely able to string together a sentence. Had he been on drugs, I imagine this whole experience would have been extremely frightening -- to be startled awake by three screaming seniors while a very tall college boy quietly sips apple juice from a coffee cup in the background.
It turns out the burning was from overcooked macaroni and, despite being the only person there, this place wasn't even the stoned guy's apartment. Bizarre. Two firefighters showed up and Lousie filled them in on all the details, still agitated (and rightfully so). By then, more people were coming out of their rooms and I ended up meeting some really funny U of S students from down the hall. Not the best circumstance to be making friends, but, hey, when life gives you lemons.
So that's the story -- this crap basically writes itself. The extra cruddy part is that this is the third time my building's fire alarm has gone off. I've been evacuated three times.
THREE!
That's thrice too many.
A few months ago, management sent everyone a memo that asked if we had any suggestions for what to name the condo. You know, something nice like "Elm Ridge" or "Windsor Terrace".
Tomorrow I think I'll submit "Smoky Mountain" or "Flaming Pines". If you have any other recommendations, please, let me know.
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