Lesson: Put on your right shoe to silence alarms.

Imagine the most obnoxious noise you could hear at three in the morning. (For those of you with the wrong imagination, it sounds like this: WERRRRRHHH! WERRRRRHHH! WERRRRRHHH!)

I woke up to that noise. It frightened me. It angered me. It confused me. I thought, "Why is my alarm so loud?!?" I hit lots of buttons on my alarm clock. No change. Noise still werrrhhhiing. "Oh, it must be my OTHER alarm. The one on my cell phone." (Please note that though I'm usually a laid-back, easygoing kind of gal, I am a paranoid freak when it comes to alarm clocks and yes, I do set two of them every night.) So I turn off my phone alarm. Still the noise. I turn off ALL the sound on my phone. Still the noise. Then, I turn off my phone completely! What a dramatic step to silence the noise! But it doesn't work.

By this time, I'm as disturbed as NicUnCool in a room full of mirrors. "WHAT IS THIS NOISE?!?!" I raged (probably silently, but maybe not... it's all a blur).

I storm out into the hall. "HALLWAY! WHAT IS THIS NOISE?!?!?" Here, the noise is louder. "STOP, NOISE!!!!!!" But it wouldn't! It wouldn't stop!

Then, my sleepy daze started to fade. Yes, I had heard this noise before! The fire alarm! The stupid, stupid fire alarm! And not an alarm just for our apartment, oh no. This one wakes up the whole building.

As I was standing in the hallway being brilliant, my roommate stomped out of her room with the same face of confusion and anger that I had. Meanwhile, our cats were scurrying about the apartment in creepier ways than usual. Three-in-the-morning chaos, that's what it was.

I sat down on my bed wondering, "Could I sleep through this?" I was tired, you see, and unlike these lamers who have Saturdays off, I had to work in the morn'. The stairwell behind our walls was rumbling with the feet of the wimps who escaped, but I didn't want to. I knew there wasn't a fire. There is NEVER a fire. But the noise was soooo loud!

Finally, after peering out the window and seeing the building refugees standing in the street, including a woman holding her cat, a young couple wrapped up in a blanket, and social neighbors chatting happily (WHO CHATS HAPPILY AFTER BEING AWOKEN AFTER THREE IN THE MORNING?) I decided to escape.

As I was putting on my right shoe, the noise stopped. It was like heaven, if heaven were my relatively affordable apartment on a stupid night where I was awoken by an alarm but then everything became quiet. "Hurrah! Hurrah! I am going to reset my two alarms and go back to sleep!" And I did.