I was blissfully asleep. The party must have been hosted at some other apartment so the neighbors that I share a bedroom wall with hadn't been blasting music that night. (Side note: last night the music was so loud that I could actually identify lyrics from that Carrie Underwood song about cheating.)
About 2:40 am: I am suddenly awakened. My window is open and two stories below there's a group of guys talking on the sidewalk. I realize what's happened and I stop paying attention and try to tune out their drunk heckling and go back to sleep.
Sleep, so close, so close.
Then somewhere an alarm starts going off. Idiots leaned against the wrong car or something.
The drunk heckling takes on a slightly different tone, one akin to oh, you're in deep shit now/that was so cool man. The guys leave and the voices stop.
The alarm is still going off fifteen minutes later. I'm beginning to think this isn't a car alarm.
Then two more voices outside my window.
Guy: So you’re just going to some strange guy’s house to have sex with him?
Girl: Well tomorrow’s Labor Day so it’s not like I have anything to do.
Guy: You’re so cool, you know that. You’re so cool.
Seriously?
I get out of bed and go into the living room. I am finally suspicious that this alarm might be coming from within my building. Sure enough, blinking through the peep hole of my front door is a strobe light.
I open the door and am practically deafened by the siren (how did I mistake this for a car alarm from my bedroom?) but over that there's a guy going down the stairwell is yelling to someone below "It wasn't pulled up here."
Okay well that answers that. Drunken idiots pulled the alarm. This was back when the "finishing touches" were still being put on my building by the construction crew. One of these final touches was the plate in the door frame that allows the door to stay closed and locked. So at this point, the door was wide open both day and night. Drunkies had reached just inside the door and pulled the alarm immediately to the left then laughed and ran away.
So, we're at the 25 minute mark when I hear pounding in the hallway. Hopeful that someone is fixing the situation! I peek out.
It's my neighbor -- whom I will now and forever refer to as Smoky because of his charming 5am introduction -- standing in the hallway, again wearing only gym shorts, with a hammer raised over his head. He is in the process of beating the crap out of the siren/strobe light warning unit on our landing.
Seriously?
We have a brief "wtf?" conversation over the noise and then I go back inside and look for an after hours emergency number, which I did not find. Meanwhile I'm watching outside and I see our friendly neighborhood rent-a-cop is leaning on a car on the other side of the street watching our stairwell.
Well if rent-a-cop already knows this is going on then I'm assuming there isn't anyone I can all that hasn't been anyway.
Then at about 3:15 am a little Toyota pulls up, parks in the middle of the street, talks to rent-a-cop and then goes into my building. About ten minutes later the siren, blissfully, stops.
Sleep!
So the next morning I open my door and there on the landing and all the way down the stairwell are the pieces of the siren/strobe light device that had been on the wall the night before.
I thought Smoky had given up on the hammer actually working. Nope. Looks like he really did beat the shit out of it. Casing, plastic mount, and computer circuits all just lying around not attached to one another or the wall.
So I gather up all the pieces in a grocery bag and turned it in to the office the next day. That shit looks expensive and I'm not paying for Smoky's anger management issues.
