Saturday night, my (absolutely wonderful) boyfriend cooked a delicious meal for us. As he was making final preparations on the meal before it was served, the fire alarm started going off. My fire alarm (which makes it go off for the whole building).
Why, might you ask? Well, I don't know. There was no smoke in the apartment, just some minor steam that was floating above the stove top. Nothing more. It was a little on the warm side in the apartment, more humid than anything. But it still went off...for several minutes. I climbed a stool (quite the site, I am certain) to press the button to make it stop squawking. When I would let go, it would start squawking again. Finally, after opening the windows and shooing in the clear, cool air from outside, the alarm ceased.
However, last night about 12:30am, the alarm went off again (not mine this time, but somewhere in the building it was going off and made all the alarms go off). I was studying for my exam in chemistry that I had this morning when it went off. I got myself dressed in some real clothes that could keep me warm in the crisp night air and gathered some entertainment (iPod Touch), my phone, my wallet and keys before marching outside to stand in the parking lot and wait for the fire department to arrive and give the all-clear sign (that took a while too -- much longer than it should have. I'll say this, (I believe this is a national standard) chute times should be less than 90 seconds at night -- this exceeded that. I contemplated crawling in the car to stay warm but toughed it out. Finally got back upstairs close to 1am and decided God was telling me to go to bed (my concentration was interrupted by the alarm, thus it was bedtime).
And, yet again today, 4:45pm-ish the alarm went off. Again. I was getting ready to leave anyway so I finished gathering my things and walked to the car and left.
Hopefully this problem of an over-reactive fire alarm system will be fixed soon. I would like to get some sleep this week seeing that it is the last week of class. It is more of a nuisance than anything but if I have to have the system over-reactive or under-reactive, I would (fortunately or not) chose to have it over-reactive.
No comments:
Post a Comment