Alarms have been haunting me all day! Four to be exact.

For a few days last week I was woken up by what I thought was a car alarm. Yesterday, from about 5 PM onward we heard the same alarm from our living room. After some investigating on Dan’s part, he found out the alarm actually belonged to a house across the street. It appeared that no one was home; an idea that was further enforced by the fact that the alarm continued to sound into the night. I managed to fall asleep sometime after midnight but was woken again by the irregular non-rhythm of the alarm around 3 AM. My sleeping was sadly disrupted all night and when it came to getting up for work in the morning, I wearily pressed the snooze button on my alarm for just five more minutes of zees. Unfortunately, instead of pressing snooze I accidentally turned off my alarm all together. The next time I woke up it was 9:50 AM and since I was meant to work at 10 AM and it takes half an hour to walk there, I was screwed.

Well, I sped walked/jogged/occasional sprinted to work and made it there by 10:10 AM (how the hell I did that, I’ll never know but it could have something to do with the fact that I set my clocks five minutes fast so I’m not late for my other job, which always has a clock five minutes faster than mine, regardless of my efforts).

After getting to the shop, I was trying to work at double speed to get everything caught up to where it should be had I not been late. While I was turning on the Christmas music a customer came in. Now, to understand how the following happened I need to explain the layout of my shop. I stand at the counter, directly in front of me is one of the doors into the shop, behind me is a counter with the phone and printer on it. Under this counter are cupboards which house binders and the stereo system. The cord from the phone hangs down in front of the cupboard doors.

All right, so, I turned on the music just as a customer entered. I turned to help him and after a few minutes while I was cashing him through an alarm started going off. It was faint but rapid and high pitched. I looked at him and he acknowledged that he heard it, too. This signalled to me that I was allowed to look for the source. After a relatively quick search I found it was coming from the phone. I had left the cupboard door open, which pulled on the phone cord, which tipped the phone off the hook!

At this point, I was pretty put off of alarms so this one got my heart racing and may have incited a little bit of stress in an otherwise stress free girl. I settled myself down after I re-hung the phone and my customer left. The day was progressing fairly well, until a man popped his head in from the street to remind me that it was Tuesday. You know what Tuesday is? Fire alarm testing day!