An alarm call

There’s this dryer in our rental house.  It’s older than dirt and doesn’t really work all that well.  For starters, it emits this weird burning type smell, (kinda like sautered wires) for the first hour or two of use.  It doeesn’t really dry very well and the buzzer goes on FOREVER!  I timed it once, it was roughly two minutes!  And it’s not the quietest buzzer on the planet.  It’s really quite annoying.  I mentioned it to the landlady, even had her listen to it . . . . she didn’t seem to think it was odd.  (I should interject that she’s your basic space cadet . . . . super nice, but spacey).

Anyway, so on Sabbath after church, the babes and I zoomed off to the airport to pick DH up.  It was a nice day, so I had opened up the windows and back screen door in the house.  I left the windows open since we’d only be gone a short while.  (I apparently also left teh screen door open.)  We happily picked DH up and headed home.  Upon arriving, we noticed to police cars on a nearby street and thought, “Hmmm, something must be going down.”  Imagine my complete at utter shock when I opened the front door  and see a bald, burly police officer standing in my living room, and another officer standing in the family room.

“Oh, you startled me!”

“Ma’am, we got an alarm call from the neighbors . . . looks like the back screen door was left open.”

“Oh, yeah, I did forget to close that.”

“Was your alarm system armed?”

Huh? Alarm system?

“Uh, I don’t think the house has an alarm, at least the landlady didn’t mention it to us.”

“Well, a neighbor called saying an alarm was going off.  But t appears that all is in order, so we’ll get out of your way.”

Alarm?  DH and I were totally puzzled.  None of the alarm clocks were set.  DH’s watch alarm wasn’t set, and even if it had been, it wouldn’t have been audible to the neighbors, even with the windows open.  We scratched our heads for a good piece of time.  As I was thinking, I looked at the laundry room and thought, “Oh, I should check on the diapers.”

. . .

 

. . .

 

. . .

 

The diapers were in the dryer.

. . .

 

. . .

 

. . .

The window was open.

. . .

 

. . .

 

. . .

 

That’s it!  The neighbor heard the insanely long dryer buzzer going off and mistook it for a house alarm.  Yeah, the neighbor called the police on the dryer!  LMBO!

Since I’m pretty sure the police have better things to do with their time than to check on dryer buzzers, I let the landlady know via email.  We’ll see if that convinces her to replace the dryer=)