1 AM: Fun AM, What-Has-My-Life-Become AM · 5:50am Sep 4th, 2016
Summer semester will get you to your college degree faster only because it is a shortcut through literal hell. Details of my finest moment the night I achieved a new personal low below the cut.
But first, please watch this video:
That time of year is coming.
Hey story time:
It is sometime in the hazy depths of July. I have made it through my industrial psychology June semester class, and only have to deal with work, online Spanish, the renovations that my apartment complex is still scrambling to finish, writing my research paper, and biking everywhere. Oh—and all the emerging physical symptoms that apparently accompany chronic stress.
But none of that matters now. I am in bed. I am asleep.
Beep.
I do not immediately know why I have awoken. My instincts hold me frozen, my breath still coming in carefully-measured, even breaths. It is a defense mechanism to keep any potential Nighttime Murder Villains from realizing I am awake.
Beep.
The noise comes from the hallway. It is loud, loud and high-pitched and angry.
Beeeeep.
The fire alarm? I lay in bed, still motionless. Maybe it will stop by itself if I pretend I haven’t heard it.
Beeeeeeeeeeeep.
I have to readjust. My body—worn from biking to and from campus—is leaner and bonier than it was before, and I can no longer lie atop my elbows without consequence. As quietly as I can, I roll onto my side and carefully extract the pinned arm
Beeep beeep
It hears me. It knows I am awake, now, and it adds another shout to its shrill, angry demands. On the windowsill, my phone buzzes. My roommates have not been spared. There is a small moment of relief as I realize I am not hallucinating.
Beep beep beep.
Beep beep beep
Cookie calls maintenance, but the universe is in cahoots with the fire alarm, and it is determined to punish us. She gets an answering machine. Undaunted, she navigates through the monotonous options with ease. Maintenance has been paged.
Beep Beep Beep
I claw my way out of the sweaty pile of blankets that shields me from the horrors of adult life. The night air is warm against my bare limbs—my nightgown tonight is an overlarge tank top that hangs on me, the hemline just long enough to cover up the scandalous bits. I notice a pressure on my scalp as my hair—pushed around by my sleep headband—flops every which way.
I shove my feet into my tattered slippers and rip open the bedroom door, ready to face my demons.
Beep Beep Beep
Small, white, and round, it screams down at me, mocking my mortality from on high.
Beep Beep Beep
Cookie also opens her bedroom door. Like a moth drawn to flame, or perhaps a sinner seeking refuge, I drift across the apartment and into her lamplit room.
BEEP BEEP BEEP.
It is quieter here. We huddle together, shaking and gritting our teeth as we wait for maintenance to arrive. Each time I consider tearing the cursed thing down myself, I hear my mother's voice, chiding me about the potential legal dangers of messing with the landlord's fire alarm.
We wait.
And wait.
And then it stops.
Cookie’s eyes widen. I feel a laugh bubbling up from my chest, wild and half-mad. This cannot be real. There is no way this can be real.
Maintenance knocks.
He sees us standing there, eyes wild and hair standing up five ways to Sunday, and then looks to the alarm. It sits on the ceiling quietly, blinking innocently back at him.
It doesn’t fool him. He heard the fit it pitched over the phone, and promptly drags a chair over to rip it from the ceiling. He discards it upon the table and leaves with our cursory thanks. His truck roars to life outside.
Cookie and I move to look at the alarm, drawn closer by the allure of its disgraced status. Oh, how the mighty have fallen—it looks so pitiful upon the table, so small.
I am a fool for the thought.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
Cookie screams. I can only stare, aghast, at what my foolishness has wrought. With trembling hands, I reach for the beast, turning it over to claw at the battery compartment. My nails are trimmed to the quicks because of my overtaxed schedule. They scrabble helplessly against the plastic.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
Warning! a sticker on the alarm says. Beware of electrocution!
The compartment won’t open.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
It’s never going to stop.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
The maintenance man is leaving.
In this moment, with the shrieking of the alarm tearing through my very being, a sort of calm washes over me, tamping down the desperation. I know what I have to do.
Time seems to slow.
I grab the alarm. Cookie begins to say something—whether to formulate a question, curse our landlord, or merely scream her anguish to the heavens, I will never know—but I am in motion. I am at the front door in two steps. No hesitation holds me back as I rip it open, revealing the soft tranquility of this humid summer’s night.
The quiet is shattered as I throw myself down the stairs, slippers scraping against the damp concrete steps. The alarm echoes through the parking lot, the sound amplified in the open space. In moments, it will wake the entire neighborhood. A fair ways away, I see the maintenance man’s truck pulling out.
A surge of adrenaline narrows my field of vision, and I run.
Behind me, Cookie is standing in the open doorway—I can hear her screaming something about underwear, but there is no time to figure out what she is talking about, because I am running.
Perhaps attending a school with a nationally-ranked football team has rubbed off on me, because I sprint across the parking lot like it’s a stadium packed with fans, and the championship game rests solely on me delivering the shrieking football safely to the truck-shaped end zone.
A light comes on in one of my neighbor’s apartments. I blaze past them without a second thought, and soon I am stumbling to a halt in front of the pickup truck, waving my arms frantically at the headlights
Maintenance man rolls down the window. I pass him the protesting alarm, and he rips out its innards without a word. At last, the parking lot falls silent.
The deed is done.
With the parking lot silent once more, I begin the long trudge back up to the apartment. A breeze picks up, skidding across my upper thighs and lower bum with an unsettling intimacy.
Too late, I remember I am not wearing pants.
The walk back leaves me plenty of time to contemplate the fact that I can now add "running through a parking lot at three AM in my slippers (sans pants) while carrying a screaming fire alarm" to my list of College Experiences.
So how was everyone else's summer?
Ah, fire alarms. When they go bad, they go bad with gusto.
The onomatopoeia of the fire alarm's buzzing having larger, bold text as the story continues is incredibly fitting. Those alarms truly become like nails on a chalkboard after a few minutes. And yeah, college can produce some unusual experiences from time to time. I can speak from experience when it comes to that.
Anyway, I hope things are going well for you, and I wish you all the best on your future projects!
I woke up with acid reflux and decided to see if there was anything to read me back to sleep.
I was not disapointed.
These blogs are great.
I spent my summer forgetting everything I learned the previous semesters, and I was looking forward to studying again - until 4 days ago when I was abruptly reminded how much work it is. "I thought I had some spare time lying around here somewhere?"
fantastic
10/10
I hope I'm not the only one mad that the maintenance guy didn't turn the fire alarm off. He took if off the ceiling... and left immediately afterwards. Those things always have batteries, jeez.
4191073 Very much so
4191114 Oho! Everyone seems to have such different experiences in college, yet a common theme tends to be how utterly crazy some of this stuff is.
Thanks!
4191155 Oh no! Hope you're feeling better, but glad you wound up here
4191185 Spare time? Just laying around??? I think I locked mine up somewhere, but it seems to have evaporated.
Good luck with your studies!
4191301 4191310 Thanks fam
4191332 It was such a comedy of errors, but also extremely characteristic of the management here.
Ah, well. At least I got an impromptu workout out of it! 
4191462 No worries cuz
Your stories are always great.
Let's hope the alarm doesn't detect more randomly generated ... Fahrenheits.
Wow that sucked.
4193537
I beg to differ.
My freshman year, I spent the school week of finals — five days, four nights — on a cumulative total of five hours of sleep.
When it was time to go home, I was a zombie. Brian, who was driving me home, tried to rouse me from where I had faceplanted on the bed. His knocking didn't work. One of my hallmates Nate had a patented "wake the dead" knock. It didn't work. They finally had to find the maintenance guy, Jack, to key open my room. They told me to get up, I promised I would, and they slipped out to the car to give me some privacy to change. But Brian, thinking ahead, unlocked the door before they left.
Five minutes later, I'm still a sleeping zombie. "Wake The Dead" doesn't work, so Brian opens the door and kicks me. I ask him how he got in, because I don't even remember them entering the room the first time. (He mentions he got Jack to open the door for them, and — "You jacked open the door!?" I interrupt, horrified.)
Probably not as objectively embarrassing, but they still rib me about it to this day.
4195996 Five hours?!? Five hours????? I'm not surprised you slept through a literal home invasion; the end of the world probably wouldn't have woken you. No wonder you didn't remember them coming in. (Five hours?¿? How were you even able to process language? How did you take your finals??? How were you not asleep on the sidewalk????)
Horrifying levels of sleep deprivation aside, that is hilarious, and I definitely see why they haven't let you live it down.
4197661
To be honest, I'm not sure! I think I blew my lifetime supply of focus on that week. I've been a pretty hardcore slacker before and since.
Oh lord.
Honestly, I would have probably murdered the alarm myself.