My husband and I are pretty smart people. Perhaps not “Stephen Hawking” smart, but smart enough to find our way out of a paper bag.
Usually.
But then something like a recent event happens that makes me wonder…
The evening started out like any other July 4th. We headed to bed with our new dog in tow, and we were glad that he didn’t seem to be freaking out that tons of folks in our neighborhood were taking advantage of the holiday by blowing stuff up.
Lots and lots of stuff. It sounded like someone had thrown a lit match into a fireworks factory.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! KAPOW! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
You get the idea.
While our dog wasn’t freaked out about it, he did decide to wake us up after we had been asleep for about an hour, because he had to go outside.
Don’t get me wrong; we’re grateful for the wake-up calls instead of having another, more messy kind of wake-up call in the morning. But in the middle of the night when you have to work the next day, it’s not exactly easy to say, “Good Boy!”
So my husband went downstairs and opened the door to let him out.
Then we heard another kind of loud sound. This time, though, it wasn’t the fireworks.
In his sleep-filled stupor, my husband had opened the door without turning off the alarm system.
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
Now that did get the dog’s attention, but just for a minute, then he went outside, probably to eat bugs and leaves.
My husband ran back in, hit the code, and turned off the alarm.
Not much time had passed, so we assumed that all was well with the alarm company.
Right?
Um, not exactly…
We discovered that on July 4th, the alarm company representatives are in the government’s equivalent of a code red—they call back no matter what.
Which would have been okay, had I not decided to play a part in this holiday drama.
When the representative called, she asked if everything was okay. I told her our story. Then she asked me for our password. I gave it to her.
She asked me again. I gave it again, thinking that she hadn’t heard me.
What actually was happening was that we had changed our password, and in my sleep-filled stupor, I decided to give her the wrong one.
Twice.
I can just imagine what was going on at the alarm system company. “Code Red! Code Red! Wojo and her husband are under attack!”
When I told my husband what happened, he said, “You know that’s not the code word, right?”
Um, let me think. Nope. I didn’t realize what I gave them wasn’t the code word.
While we were arguing, um, I mean discussing what our code word was or wasn’t, the doorbell rang. Two of Baltimore’s finest were there, checking to see if we were okay. By this time, we were wide awake and totally embarrassed.
The police officer made my husband show him photo identification. I came bounding down from upstairs in my pj’s holding the dog who had brought us into this situation in the first place.
“I gave the wrong password!” I said, out of breath because I was running through my house in the middle of the night carrying a dog and trying not to hyperventilate because the police were at my door.
The officers told us that they would rather have it be a mistake then to have us in danger.
We went back to bed. Within five minutes, my husband and the dog were sound asleep. After my heart stopped racing, I joined them.
A few nights later, the dog woke us up at 3 a.m. to go outside.
“Don’t forget to turn the alarm off,” I said to my husband.
“That will NEVER happen again,” he said.
Because, you know, we both are geniuses…
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not trying to punch her way out of a paper bag or remember a password in the middle of the night, writes Wojo’s World™ from Baltimore.