It's Presidents' Day today, but I have to work. By failing to honor the great men who have led our country, obviously my corporate masters hate America and hate freedom. However, since our vacation plan must have been designed by freedom-hating European-style socialists bent on undermining the work ethic -- at this point in my seniority, I get almost six weeks off per year -- I don't really mind missing this particular rainy, gloomy holiday. (Although if this were Europe, I'd get all of my time off plus every single esoteric holiday on the calendar -- feast days for little-known saints, anyone?)
Making work that much more difficult this morning is the fact that the fire alarm is blaring at the YMCA day care center down the street. At first, I thought that it was a burglar alarm, so I called the police department's non-emergency number; then I walked down there and discovered it was the fire alarm, so I came back home and called 911. I obviously wasn't the first person to do so, as the dispatcher's voice had a certain edge to it as she informed me that the fire department had already been there, determined that it was a false alarm, and was trying to contact someone to open the building and turn it off.
My first call was around 7 AM, and the alarm is still going strong over three hours later. We don't live right next door, so it's not so loud that the dogs are going crazy and we can't hear ourselves think -- rather, it's a constant low ringing that's just loud enough and is at just the right frequency to burrow into your mind and break all concentration.
Hopefully they can find someone who can come down and shut the damn thing off, but I'm guessing that the chances of digging up a YMCA employee on a holiday weekend have to be pretty low. How long before someone in the neighborhood decides to 'shut off' the alarm himself, like a car vandalized on a busy New York City street (scroll down to the comments) because its alarm has been going off for hours and nobody cares?
[10:45 AM UPDATE: They finally turned the alarm off, not fifteen minutes after I finished writing this. Obviously somebody out there was reading my blog.]
Posted by Kevin at February 21, 2005 10:23 AM