Fire! Wait.....Fire?

True love is demonstrated by running back into a burning building because your husband forgot his iced tea.

Okay, perhaps the building wasn't actually on fire, but I didn't know that for sure at the time!  For all I knew, I could have been risking life and limb for iced tea!

Here's how it went down:

Rex and I were about to sit down to a nice homemade dinner.  Rex wanted to watch a TV show while we ate, but I said I would prefer to sit and talk.  Rex won.  We were just sitting down at the coffee table, Rex turned on the TV, and...

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(That's the sound of a fire alarm going off.  Did that hurt your eyes?  Well, it hurt our ears ten times more).

Rex almost dropped his bowl of pasta, he was so startled.  He ran to our smoke alarm to reset it, but it wasn't our alarm that was going off.  This was a huge relief to me, because I was thinking, "Dang! I haven't set off the smoke alarm in over a year!  I thought I was getting this cooking thing down!  How did I screw up pasta?!"  Ha ha. It turned out that it was the building-wide smoke alarm that was going off.  All of the apartments were screaming.  There's an intercom alarm that goes off in each apartment building-wide, and that's what was causing the ruckus.

Rex grabbed his dinner, grabbed the dog, and we headed outside.  In retrospect, why did no one grab the cat??  Sorry Els.  We quickly analyzed the situation and determined that there was no smoke, so we were probably okay.  The alarm was LOUD, though.  Rex sat down to begin eating, and I said, "Ha, see? You thought you won the TV debate, but actually I won after all.  Now we're just going to sit and talk."  Rex forgot his iced tea, though, so I had to go back in and get it.  My ears are still a little numb, and my head kills.  Oh well.  I didn't mind, because it also gave me a chance to grab my jelly beans (we still didn't grab the cat...).

I'm glad I grabbed the jelly beans, because we ended up sitting out there for about a half an hour.  The apartment managers couldn't figure out what to do, and of course the maintenance man was gone, and the part he would need to fix the problem was probably in Australia, etc. etc.  It was a perfect storm for nothing to get done.  Then the apartment manager said, "Well, I have to go pick up my daughter from preschool, so... hopefully you guys get this fixed!  Another maintenance guy should be on his way soon!"   One of the guys from an apartment a few doors down from mine was seriously mad at her for leaving, but I felt like saying, "Dude.  Her daughter is three.  You're at least thirty.  Which one of the two can better fend for themselves?"

After she left, the fire department showed up.  They walked around the building and couldn't find anything wrong, but they also couldn't figure out how to turn the alarm off.  Six firemen were trying to solve this, and they couldn't shut it off.  Gah!  While they were standing around discussing the situation, I seriously considered asking if I could check out the inside of their truck.  It looked so cool. I finally decided that it would only be socially acceptable if I had a child with me: "Hey, my little cousin Benny here really wants to be a fireman when he grows up.  Do you think he could look in your truck?"  And then I would roll my eyes affectionately like "Kids these days..." and the fireman would let me into his inner sanctum of fire fighting.  Unfortunately, I had no Benny to be my front man.  I figured saying that Elvis wanted to be a fire dog one day was a bit of a stretch.  So I just sat on my stoop and watched the firemen try various things to make our apartments shut up.

Finally, after about a half hour, one of the firemen jumped a fence into one of the clubhouse areas and shut off the alarm (for now).  Yaaaaaaaaaay!  And then...sadly...they drove away without letting me look inside their truck.

At least I got something out of this situation: an addition to my bucket list.  I'm going to see the inside of a fire truck one day.  Now I just gotta find a kid named Benny...