Dorm life has been good to me. My roommate isn't insane, my desk is still visible beneath my clutter, and the mini-fridge is stocked with bottled water and Halloween chocolate. Sure, maybe I haven't made my bed in three weeks, and maybe I have to exercise caution whenever I open my closet to avoid an avalanche, but that's nothing new to me.
One that that is new to me is being forced out of bed, out of the dorm and into the cold, unforgiving night air at one in the morning by a shrieking fire alarm. Call me strange, but that's not exactly what I wanted to be doing on a Saturday night.
I was hoping we could have gotten the fire alarm shenanigans out of our systems at seven yesterday morning. The first time this happened.
Saturday morning, we stood shivering outside our dorm, wondering if our bleary-eyed, half-asleep (and in some cases, obviously hungover) suffering was the result of a prank, a malfunction or a wildfire raging through our cluttered dorm rooms. As it turned out, it happened to be the second option: a misfiring fire alarm in one of the ground-floor dorm rooms. Nothing the residents of said room could do about it.
Anyway, back to the narrative.
One in the morning.
One. In. The. Morning.
For the second time, that damn fire alarm went off, and we scurried outside, wrapped in blankets and jackets and Snuggies, shepherded into the courtyard by our equally perturbed RA's. The police were called to investigate the errant alarm system, and we were told the problem had been fixed, so we went back inside. Back to our warm beds to sleep, study or (in my case) read the latest chapter of Soul Eater.
If there is a God of Fire Alarms, he is a vengeful god indeed.
For the next forty or so minutes, the fire alarm continued to blare at five-minute intervals, shrieking in short bursts and then being subdued into sweet silence. Thus far, it's been cooperative since its last outburst, but how long that will last, it's hard to say.
Unless someone finally did the world a service and yanked the offending piece of tech out of the ceiling.
If my roommate's hair straightener catches fire, I swear I will sleep through it.
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