doodledee

Our neighbors have one of those house security system things. It's mostly there to keep me out of their beer fridge while they're on vacation, but it also serves to detect break-ins and fires and stuff. This evening while cooking dinner, the babysitter smoked up the kitchen enough to trigger the full house alarm. She unfortunately had no idea how to turn it off, so she picked up the phone and tried frantically to find someone who did. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

When the alarm wasn't reset in time, the alarm company mothership tried calling the homeowner to verify everything was ok. Because the babysitter was on the phone, the mothership couldn't get through. Because the mothership couldn't get through, the local fire and police were notified. Because the local fire and police were notified, my pre-dinner entertainment was much better than average.

I'm the 'neighbor contact' on their alarm system so my phone rang pretty much right away. The mothership dude asked if I had a key to their house to let the fire and police in when they got there. I almost said no - just so I'd get to see some police dude kick down a door - but then I thought back to all the free jalepeno poppers they've given me and decided earn some karma and just let them in. As it turns out, the sitter was in the house and it didn't matter anyway.

When the fire department got there they parked their truck right in front of our house. We went out to look around and one of the paramedic dudes offered to let us climb up inside the truck and look around. He even posed for a picture. It was quite a scene.