Faulty Wiring

I love fire alarms. Everybody loves fire alarms. Especially the ones that go off at 3AM for no reason other than that the system is old and rickety and randomly short-circuits itself when it’s bored.

What always amazes me about these late-night episodes is just how long it takes me to wake up, realize that I am indeed awake and not in some odd form of lucid dream, and finally after several minutes of anxious cogitation discover that I’ve been woken up by a very loud buzzing noise. Once I’ve made it that far it’s easy to connect the dots and figure the odds of a real fire, or at least a real fire drill with donuts outside for timely evacuators - odds which are always far below my getting-out-of-bed threshold. Or maybe it’s only properly amazing if you’re me, and you’ve been waking up fully aware of your surroundings every morning of your life, no matter how early “morning” was or what unfamiliar person was squealing “wakey wakey!” into your ear, coming abruptly out of nightmares with only a faint lingering horror, etc, etc. Whatever, it’s a very disturbing fugue state and will probably be the death of me if I’m ever in a real fire.

Tomorrow: how the showers used to try to kill me by randomly cutting off cold water so I crack my head on the floor while leaping to avoid being scalded. They’ve mostly fixed that, though.

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