naz said:
while I download what is the backstory?
some of you may remember my past postings about the joys of fire alarms and living in the dorms. moving off-campus, i thought i was done with that stage of my life. i was wrong.
for some reason, the fire alarm in our apartment has been malfunctioning all night. it started going off about 15 minutes after midnight, though it stopped about five minutes later. now, the smoke detectors are hard wired to the building, but our apartment was the only one affected. we all shrugged it off, i went back to playing games, everyone else went back to sleep.
at 4:30 AM, it began anew, waking everyone in the apartment up. after five minutes, we realized it wasn't going to stop. venturing outside, no one else was affected.
we carefully inspected the apartment for a reason why the five fire alarms (one in each bedroom, one in the living room) would go off in unison, without affecting anything else in the building.
after ten minutes, we trekked to the leasing office to see what we could find, which turned out to be an empty building.
after fifteen minutes, we still hadn't turned up any emergency contact numbers. the sheet of paper we were given only had one emergency number, being 911. so we did what any sane person would do...called 911. in between the blarings, the dispatcher was able to jot down enough information to send someone our way.
that someone turned out to be three fire trucks.
after spending twenty minutes searching, the fire department could find nothing that would have caused the alarms to activate, nor could they find a way to deactivate them. they attempted to contact apartment management to no avail.
thus, the fire department left, though the alarms were still screaming. after being awake for about forty-five minutes, we fled to Steak 'N Shake - leaving a nice note on the door detailing how to reach us.
after watching the sun rise at Steak 'N Shake (and getting some free cheesy fries), we ventured back to our apartment. was it over?
nope.
incredibly frustrated, we all began donning headphones with blaring music. it helped to keep us sane.
with nothing else to do, i called the leasing office to leave a voice mail detailing our situation. in the maintenance sub-menu was a paging number to be used for emergencies. needless to say, i immediately paged said person.
for being 6:15 AM, they responded rather fast. "Yea, our apartment's fire alarm has being going off since 4." "Oh, I should be out there in thirty minutes."
this brings us to the present, roughly 6:22 AM. i'm fortunate enough to not have classes today, but my roommates aren't so lucky. this is just fucking ridiculous, and the fact that the emergency contact was hidden within a submenu instead of printed on our emergency contact sheet is rather infuriating.
asdf.
over three horus after this all started, it's finally revealed that this whole ordeal was caused by the death of a battery on one of the smoke alarms - specifically, the one in my room.
i was gonna go back to bed, but what's the point as it's almost 8.
MrPing1000 said:
hang on u didn't try taking the batteries out?
they're 10 feet up! it's not like they were going "beep beep" to warn us - it was a full blown siren moving across the five main smoke detectors.
even the fire department and maintenance guy couldn't figure it out. considering the detectors are also wired into the apartment's power supply, i don't get it either.