First off, I'd like to apologize to the neighbors for the helicopters. I thought they were overkill, but apparently protocol is protocol.
OK, let me back up a little here.
Remember, back a few months ago when I mentioned we'd just bought an alarm system for the house? And remember when I said it probably wasn't going to go so well? I'm not quite sure this is the sort of thing about which I want to be able to say "I told you so," but, well, I told you so.
So the alarm went off the other night. Now, one thing to remember about alarms: They never go off at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon when you're watching the Masters and eating popcorn and are fully rational (relatively speaking) and able to take the steps necessary to make them stop producing that awful sound. Which, in our case, would be to just close the back door gale force winds had blown open.
No, that would be too easy.
Alarms only go off at midnight, when you and your wife are sound asleep and your teenage son and some of his friends are upstairs eating all your food and wiping out zombies. And they keep going off while you stagger out of the bedroom, hitting every door frame, chair, bar stool, lamp, chew toy and really heavy, toe-crushing piece of furniture you own on the way to the keypad. It's like your house becomes a giant pinball machine, and you're about to flash "TILT."
Anyway, the wind blew our door open at a little after midnight Sunday morning. The fact it did is largely the result of the last person who opened it not closing it firmly enough, which makes it that person's fault. The fact that I didn't check it just before I went to bed, which is one of my "man of the house" duties, makes that previous point ... well, something we're just not going to get into right now. I mean, who wants to live in the past, right?
Part of the deal with our alarm company is, if the alarm goes off, they're supposed to call and confirm this isn't a real-life incident, but is, in fact, the homeowner being an idiot. They confirm this by asking your name and your security code.
Now, under normal circumstances, telling someone my name isn't that much of a challenge. At midnight when I'm not quite awake, it's a little more hit or miss. And if you ask me for a security code, well, there's just no telling what you're going to get. Could be my ZIP code. Could be my address, inverted. Could be Brooks Robinson's career fielding percentage. What it's probably not going to be is the four digits they really want, in the proper sequence. Which is where things start getting crazy.
First came the calls to our cell phones. Then, the police showed up. Frankly, I can't imagine a more thankless job than coming to someone's house at just past the middle of the night and trying to determine if this was just a false alarm or if the burglar has cleverly disgusted himself by wearing pajamas and a Breath Right strip.
Thirty minutes later it was the squadron of Army Rangers touching down in the front yard. You'd be amazed at how quickly those guys can install floodlights and concertina wire. However, the hard part may be convincing the Property Owner's Association those machine gun towers are actually part of a play yard.
And while they didn't locate any miscreants, fiends or murderers in the bushes around the house, they did recover a couple of baseballs and an oven mitt I've been looking for. Stupid dog.
It's been a few days now, and the U.N. Peacekeepers who were, apparently, Phase Five of our alarm company's program have settled in nicely. They're from Norway, which explains why there's a big plate of something they call Laks in the fridge. I don't know. Could be Spam. They say they'll stay until things stabilize around here. So, it could be a while.
I would like to mention that during the entire pseudo assault on Castle Smith, including the wailing alarm, the cell phones and the visit from various authorities, neither our fearless watchdogs (OK, a mutt and a Pomeranian. Really, what was I expecting?) or the pack of teenaged boys upstairs reacted in any way. In fact, they had to be told the alarm had gone off.
But we were safe from zombies.
Commentary on 04/17/2014