by mnp13 » October 23rd, 2010, 12:07 am
7am, we're sleeping peacefully and suddenly our alarm starts going off. Demo jumps out of bed, grabs his shot gun and hauls ass out of the room. I call after him "that's the fire alarm! Who are you going to shoot?" So he shuts it off, comes back, drops the fire power off and goes to see if our house is burning down.
Nothing.
Then I hear the local fire whistle start and know who that's for! CRAP. My phone rings, it's the alarm company and I tell them that we are home and awake (the dead couldn't sleep through our siren, and we have two of them in the house.) Yes, please call back the fire trucks.
So I get up and take the dogs out. A few minutes go buy and a guy comes flying up to our house in a truck, jumps out and asks me what my address is. I tell him and he says "did you know you have a fire?" I looked at him (as if I would be calmly standing in front of my house letting my dogs pee, with Connor barking his head off inside if my house was on fire) and said "the alarm went off but we don't know why. We were still in bed. I tried to have you called back, I'm really sorry." And he tells me that they have to go through my house by law. Wonderful.
So then the chief pulls up and I repeat the whole thing. He gets a call over his radio, and he responds that he's at the house and it's a false alarm. A minute later, a hose truck pulls up and a dozen firemen in full gear pour out of it. I laughed and said "Really, there isn't a fire. The carbon monoxide detectors are clear as well. I checked." He said he wanted to check them all. Ok, fine.
So I get Ruby to leave the poor guy alone. Riggs is just staring at all of them in their weird outfits, it's Ruby who is bugging the crap out of them. Stuff them in their crates and lead the parade. I had to convince them that no the one in the hall is not a heat detector, it's the smoke detector. No really. No REALLY. Then I showed them the heat detector in the laundry room. Then told them that they really didn't need to go upstairs, but we could go to the basement.
That's when one of the fully suited firemen commented how great the house looks (it currently looks like a bomb went off, I've had a bad few weeks) and I just stared at him not comprehending. He used to be a tenant before we bought it... won-der-ful. Burning it down would improve it over the condition we bought it in. He was being nice, and I appreciated the compliment, but it's always weird to meet ex-occupants.
So we go to the basement, where we fine a smoke detector with a red light on. THAT's the one. But why? Obviously none of us are standing in fire, we would notice! And the chief says... as he brushes cobb webs out of his hair... SOMETIMES SPIDERS GET IN THEM AND SET THEM OFF. He stands there yanking on the cover, and I'm about to tell him "you break it, you bought it" when ex-tenant says "try turning it." And it opens right up to show us a GREAT BIG SPIDER.
I apologized profusely for interrupting their morning, though remarked that it was better that it was 7 and not 3!! They agreed went on their way.... and I sucked up all those evil little things...
Michelle
Inside me is a thin woman trying to get out. I usually shut the bitch up with a martini.