I've got the power

The last two days the Irish weather has really lived up to its reputation as "four seasons in one day". From shining and warming sun, to snow, wind that holds several marks on a lot of scales, hail and fog, things seem to change every time you look out the window. Going to bed last night, our brick house was shook to its foundations by a very aggressive wind cutting the corners and puffing down the chimney to our non-functioning fireplace. Some of my work mates reported on lack of sleep caused by hail storms and general weather harshness, but true Vikings won't let a bit of rough weather keep them from their much needed beauty sleep. I slept like a log in a bog in the fog. But you can imagine I wasn't particularly pleased when I was awoken this morning at 6 o'clock by an insistent beeping sound from the hallway. Drowsy and with no night vision to speak of, I stumbled out of bed to find that turning on the light did not aid my lack of vision, as the power was clearly gone out in the flat. Grr.

Aided only by the faint light from my mobile phone, I found and managed to put on a new pair of contact lenses, and set out to find the source of the rather annoying beeps. In the hall a red light was blinking - clearly our alarm had gone off. Now, since I've been here I've never turned on our alarm, never known how to activate it, not to mention never having been told any code to turn it off. We have a burglar alarm in the flat. Nice. It is probably useful to have such a thing if the dodgy characters that roam the streets around Fitzwilliam Square at night looking for late evening workers, decide to try their luck at other illegal activities that strip people of their safety, freedom and other valuables. That has never happened, however, and I was surprised to find the alarm going off while our door and other entrances was clearly untouched. What's more - no one had turned the damn thing on, so why was it beeping?

My lovely flatmate Tanya, who, bless her sleeping heart, could snooze through a foreign invasion or fire or worse, was not stirred by the alarm - but rather by a very insisting door knocking from her slightly baffled Norwegian, who could not for the life of me figure out how to handle this unsuspected situation of no power and a lot more alarm than I usually preferred. So, with her aid, as well as her reassurance that neither of us had in fact activated the alarm in any way, we went about to try to stop the noise before alarm centralists or the likes would come running. No mention of any codes in any papers we had, which we searched frantically with flashlights (one of my absolute favourite inventions, by the way - I can imagine the joy of this supposed God when he created light; I am still thrilled every time I turn on a flashlight in the pitch dark and there is, sure enough, light!), and no way to turn the power off the alarm, as there was no power to be turning off. All was pitch dark as far as we could see from our window too - but granting that it was 6 in the morning, and not a lot of people would be expected to have a lot of lights on at home, we still weren't sure if it was a local power issue, or something affecting more of the neighbourhood. And this wasn't even our main worry, as the both of us would rather just fall back into bed, something that was very little tempting with the constant beeping from the alarm box just outside my room.

The solution to our problems eventually came from the one technique that rarely fails when you're stuck in a rut, however: staring at the wall. No, I am pointing no fingers or accusing anyone of being less than average intelligent, but what we did find by just staring blindly at the alarm, trying to think what to do, was actually the code to the alarm written ON THE WALL below the alarm. Now, that's what I call smart thinking... We tried the numbers that looked inconspicuous in themselves, written innocently under the alarm box, and sure enough the whole thing went quiet and happy. With no resolution to the power situation, we figured there was not much to do about that until morning anyway, so with newfound quiet I returned to my bed with one question: who is so stupid as to write the alarm code right under the alarm? Probably the same kind of people who write their PIN code ON their credit cards, just in case... Hello, burglars, welcome in; here's how to turn off this annoying device designed to alert people of your presence. (One of the many myths about the Irish are that they are a bit thick and slow at times. While avoiding to draw any general conclusions, I'll just say that this did not exactly contribute to prove that particular myth wrong.)

The end of the story is that I woke up again a short while later, when my own alarm clock went off (which I had set myself, something that didn't really make it less annoying, but at least I knew what it was and why it went off!), with my room bathed in light, as I had clearly turned everything on when testing if the power was really out e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e in the flat. Happy days, then; power had been given back to me. Tanya, however, poor thing, had taken a shower by flashlight, as it had only just come back five minutes before I woke up...

But now, to all you creepy criminals who probably assume that it's safe to break in to the Shire because you know how to disable the alarm - how wrong you are in your presumptions! Being the smart, sassy and empowered women (technically!) that we are, Tanya and myself have removed every trace of the writing on the wall, hidden the code in a safe place - and now we even know how to use our alarm! So at least one good thing came out of the whole incident - we've now got the power (sic!)...