Flanagan Clan

When we first moved into our apartment I discovered a little plate (like a switch plate or outlet plate) that looked like it had some sort of speaker or microphone behind it, and we joked that the apt. complex was spying on us. Well, last night at 2:45 AM we found out what it was. A FIRE ALARM! We have some roudy young neighbors that live two floors above us, and they often have loud parties or have loud domestic disputes, and pretty much everyone in our building can hear them because they didn’t do a great job soundproofing everything. Well, last night we woke up suddenly to the shrill sound of a fire alarm and, in a dazed state, fumbled around the apartment trying to figure out what had turned it on. Then I realized that the sound was coming from the plate in the wall…. and it was REALLY LOUD. The alarm was going off in every apartment in our unit. We put some scotch tape over the holes in the plate to try to lessen the insanely loud and shrill sound, which helped only a very little bit, and proceeded to get ready to leave the building. After waking up Patrick, who is still sick (and didn’t even wake up when he heard the sound!), and trudging several feet out our door, the neighbors came to us and told us that it was a false alarm, that they had accidentally set it off, and that the fire department was on their way to turn it off. We went back inside, I changed Patrick’s diaper and gave him a bottle of electrolytes, and he went immediately back to bed. We, however, could not go back to bed because the alarm was still on. So we cleaned up our house from our little Irish dinner. I got through most of the dishes before the alarm went off. During that time you could hear angry neighbors outside upset that it was taking so long to get the alarm off. It took 40 whole minutes! After the alarm was off I tried to get back to sleep and got to hear, instead, the roudy neighbors (they’re a boyfriend and girlfriend) have a big fight and there was a bit of banging going on. Not too long after that, we saw flashing lights through our bedroom window. One peep showed two fire trucks parked out in front of our apartment, though we’re not exactly sure why they had come, now that the alarm was off. It was a long time before we were able to get back to sleep.

We really need to get our own place…