Fire Drill at 1:40 A.M.

Panel Showing "Fire!"

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, there was a horrifyingly frightening event: the fire alarm went off. Insistently. At 1:40 a.m. With hardly any wits about me, I dashed up the stairs (the panel showed it was the second floor smoke detector that had been tripped), but there was no smoke or fire or smell of anything at all.

2nd Floor Landing / Smoke Detector Visible at Top of Picture

Had I had any sense, I would have realized it would be good to get visiting former student Tim Schwarz up and out of his upstairs guest room.

I let the alarm monitoring company still dispatch the fire department...I wanted someone with expertise to confirm that my house was not on fire. Of course, there was nothing. Just a tripped smoke detector.

Unfortunately, once the household settled back in and got to sleep again, the alarm went off again quite a few more times, starting up again around 4 am. So I put in a call to the alarm service and got a technician to call me back, but his recommendations for how to get the alarm to quit going off were to no avail.

The Faulty Smoke Detector

Since my company is right across the street from the house, the technician came at about 7:45 am. He determined that the contacts had gone bad in the detector, and he replaced it. No more issues or problems. And I'm trying not to put too much thought into what would have been had there actually been a fire. That house would go up like a tinderbox.

Let's not think about that. Instead, let's think about this: