Nina had gone uptown for a couple of errands and to collect yarn (that’s a story by itself … one for her to tell) and I was working on a Request for Information response when a neighbor called. She wanted to know if we had a cell phone number for their neighbors across the street, Troy and Dianne, because there was some kind of an alarm going off in their house. The couple who live there are friends (Troy and I “exited” from our last employer at the same time last summer) and his wife Dianne is Nina’s secretary in the prison Relief Society. So it would be possible that we had a cell phone number, but we didn’t. However, his parents live in the area and I was able to find their phone number and called them. A few minutes later Troy called me on my cell phone. They were in the Salt Lake area for the Thanksgiving weekend and he wanted me to go check out his house. They have a special lock on the back door that takes a combination, so I went over to their house and he talked me through opening the door. From outside it sounded like every smoke alarm in the house was going off. It was pretty loud outside!

I got the door opened about the time that Troy’s father arrived. We walked through the house to find everything OK, except all six smoke detectors upstairs were alarming. We got those stopped and found that one of the detectors was malfunctioning. They’re all wired together so if one goes off, they all go off (we have the same wiring configuration). There is certainly no way anyone would be able to sleep through all that noise!

So, all is now well in their house, except for one smoke detector that will have to be replaced. But it got me thinking about the overall situation. They were out of town and no one in the neighborhood knew how to reach them. The neighbors who heard the alarm did try to look in the windows (all the blinds were down) and probably would have called the fire department if they thought there was any smoke coming out.

So what if the alarms were going off in our house? A good friend of Nina’s has a key to our house, but she lives more than a mile away. There’s also one in a lock box on the outside garage door; someone would need the combination to open the lock box. However, if anyone heard the alarms, it would be someone in the neighborhood.

Maybe the right solution is to post something somewhere (perhaps in the window by the front door) with my cell phone number? That way someone could call in case of an emergency when we weren’t home. Would that be a signal for thieves? A couple of homes in the neighborhood have been robbed when the family was gone on vacation. I’ll have to do some thinking about this.