Keeping Peace

I have an important job more or less. If there is an emergency I need to be prepared, alert, attentive, detail oriented, observant, clear-headed and all sorts of other words that you put on a resume. (Perhaps we should underline the ‘if’...there now it looks better.) All of the important campus alarms travel through unknown wires and end up within an arms reach of my desk. I suppose that sounds funny a noise being in arms reach. What I mean is that the alarms come from speakers attached to computers with view screens and buttons and that these are all accessible with a swivel of a chair and a slight stretch. A lot of important alarms come in with pomp and ceremony, vim and vigor. I swivel, I read, I acknowledge, I dispatch, I save the world. Fire alarms are a good example. When someone burns their popcorn I make sure the fire trucks know where to go.

A lot of slightly less important alarms also come in with pomp and ceremony, vim and vigor. Earth Faults are a good example. Now an earth fault sounds pretty memorable. I mean if your earth just stopped working you would want to take note, right? You would perhaps assign it to come in on two separate panels incase one was not working properly due to the impending end of the world and you would give it a magical ability to clear itself since you trust that the world might right itself before the appropriate authorities arrived and you wouldn’t want too many people to get into a tizzy when the world is taking care of itself. And you would think, wouldn’t you, that the earth wouldn’t commit suicide very often either. You would be wrong.

Let’s pause and play a little math game for a moment. There are a lot of minutes in an hour. Let’s say that the average hour has 60 of them. For an 8 hour shift that makes 480 minutes. There are 3, 8-hour shifts a day for a total of 1440 minutes more or less. Now everyone knows that I have a propensity towards exaggeration (this is my good Kerry blood.) However, since 1818 of the day before yesterday the earth has faulted albeit irregularly an average of once a minute. A veces, there are less than 30 seconds between faulty earths but there is never more than 5 minutes. This fact can be scientifically and officially backed by 104. At the end of my shift 2262 minutes will have transpired since 1818 (~920 figuring into my paycheck). But wait, there’s more. Each time the earth slits it’s wrists it quickly applies a band-aid and the system clears itself in usually less than 3 seconds. However, both alarms still require me to push a button to shut them up. If you are keeping score that would be 4524 button presses (1840 for yours truly). At this point in the evening (morning for you less time challenged folk) I don’t swivel, I don’t read, I don’t dispatch, I don’t even recognize that I reach for the F4 button when I hear the whine start up anymore. This morning when I stumbled in late at 1240 I was assured that the problem was examined sometime after my shift and I assume reasoned unfixable or unfindable because it is still in existence. The approximate time for the grand finale is still unknown but it is only a matter of time.

The Earth has Faulted. Earth=Over thanks to Gordon College and nothing can be done. I hope your bags are packed.

Oh and by the way, 104, I quit…but not because of the alarms.