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This morning, at precisely 6am, my sleep was interrupted by a series of loud beeps. I was at first disoriented with respect to my environment, but when I regained my senses I assumed the beeping was coming from the garbage trucks that empty the dumpsters outside the apartment building. These garbage trucks are a menace. They come at all hours of day, sometimes twice a day, to empty the two dumpsters by my building. Two dumpsters that have never in the seven weeks I've been here been anywhee near half-full. And they come at all hours of the day, as early as seven in the morning and as late as 2 at night. But it wasn't the back-up alarm of the garbage trucks that woke me up this morning.

The garbage truck beeping is always accompanied by the loud, scratching sound made by the dumpster being dragged across the concrete, and that sound was thankfully absent. But the beeps went on and on. Much longer than the garbage truck beeps usually last. So I finally abandoned my cocoon of blankets and crawled out of bed to investigate the racket. As soon as I got out of my room and into the hall, I realized (as you have probbaly already done) exactly what it was. It was an alarm clock.

It was my roommate Scott's alarm clock. He had gone home the night before (he lives in St. Louis), but had apparently forgotten to turn off his alarm clock. (All of this begs the question, why was his alarm clock set to go off at 6am on a WEEKEND?) I tried to get into his room, but the door was locked. I was freezing cold, so I retreated to my bed to decide what to do next. My first idea was to wait it out. If alarm clocks were intelligent, they would shut themselves off after 15 or 20 minutes, since most people don't sleep through 15 or 20 minutes of loud, piercing beeps (with a few notable exceptions, of course). Then I remembered, alarm clocks aren't intelligent. So it was back to the drawing board.

The second course of action I thought of, and quickly discarded, was to break into Scott's room. As soon as I thought back to my last attempt to break into a room (last spring when I locked myself out of my room), I realized that I lacked the necesary skills to put that plan into motion. But then I had a brainstorm.

Out of the fog of my mind, I recalled seeing an electrical panel in the kitchen. So I again left the comfort of my bed and stumbled into the kitchen (remember, this thing started at 6am, and I was pretty tired). When I got to the kitchen, I looked around for the panel, and at first I had trouble fining it. I thought it was near the back of the room, by the microwave, but it was behind the kitchen table. Once I turned on the lights in the kitchen (another of my brilliant ideas), all of this became clear. So I walked over to it, dragged the table out of the way, and opened the panel. My initial plan had been to cycle through all the low watt circuit breakers (I assumed that the large ones were probably associated with the various kitchen appliances) until I found the one that shut the damn beeping up (you hadn't forgotten about the beeping, had you?). But when I opened up the box I discovered that all the circuit breakers were labelled, including two that said "BED RM RECP," which i interpreted to mean "Ben Room Receptacles." I flipped the first breaker with that label, and I was rewarded with blissful silence. I waited a full minute (out of respect for any computer equipment that might have been shutdown by my actions) and then turned the circuit back on. Again, silence.

I made my way back to my room, checked to see if my clock had lost the time (it hadn't), got back in bed, and went to sleep. Twenty-two minutes later, the garbage truck showed up.

Posted by on 30 September 2001 at 4:12 PM