The Sound And Our Fury

You know what it's like.

After slaving away at some paper deep into the night, you finally stumble into bed. You toss and turn and draw your blankets around you in an attempt to fight off the feeling that you've forgotten something important. Finally, just as the sweet release of sleep is about to come to you, it happens. The sirens go off. An agonized, inhuman wail that rips the night apart. Nearly deafened, you leap out of bed, nearly tripping over your shoes and cracking your skull open on the edge of your desk.

Air raid? Flash flood warning? The Second Coming? No.

Lambein.

Yes, someone in Lambein has somehow managed to set off a smoke-detector at three in the morning.

Granted, there are other possible reasons for the alarms going off- someone at the nearby rest home may have been injured, or someone might have gotten into an accident. However, since the beginning of this semester, the sirens have gone off at least once a day without fail- even if all the old folks were having at each other with chainsaws and the parking lot below Roth was turned into a demolition derby the sirens wouldn't be going off with such frequency.

It is also granted that the smoke-detectors in Lambein are located directly over the stoves, however a siren going off every day, often three or four times a day, is simply inexcusable no matter where the dectectors are. Seriously, they either take some basic cooking lessons or stop using the stoves. If theycan't cook some basic food without burning it, maybe it would be best if they didn't cook it at all (for the love of heaven, we've got a dining hall that serves three meals a day, and countless places around campus where you can buy food), let alone at three in the morning.