If the fire alarm system in your new apartment complex goes off six times within your first thirty days, and your apartment complex has a “move out within the first thirty days, no questions asked” policy, move the fuck out!

Last night, the fire alarms here sounded for over half an hour, and this system from hell is strident! So, as usual when the alarms go off here, we just kind of moseyed around, looked off the balcony, saved the files we were working on, so on and so forth. Because, like the boy who cried wolf, these alarms cry fire all the time, and there hasn’t been a fire yet. The complex employees then remind us to treat each alarm as a real fire and evacuate. Um, yeah, not likely. The fire department didn’t even show up for twenty minutes, and they are only a half a mile away. So clearly we are all taking these alarms with a canister of salt.

Then, after one of these alarms, we always get an email explanation from the office. Someone was smoking in the halls… some douche kid pulled the fire alarm… someone tried to drive through the clearly marked parking garage entrance with a truck that’s too tall. It seems the fire alarms respond with force to idiotic behavior. Last night though, there actually was an emergency. Not a fire, but an emergency.

The sprinkler system, the one that each and every apartment has installed, exploded in someone’s apartment, flooding the apartment and the one next to it. And somehow I just know that the apartment complex insurance isn’t going to pay for what is, quite clearly, their liability.

Next up…

What apartment property managers have in common with defeated medieval warriors.

-OR-

How Riley’s ninja half will exact revenge should the few possessions she actually cares about get critically wounded due to someone else’s faulty sprinkler system.