Alarm at the office

I watched a massive trophy buck canter boldly across an Alabama clear cut in broad daylight. The excitement built within me as I placed the crosshairs of my riflescope on his shoulder and my finger caressed the trigger.

The phone by my bed rang insistently and I was yanked from my pleasant dream into hearing my company’s alarm service telling me that there were multiple motion sensors being activated at my office; the police had already been notified.

Damn!

I jumped out of bed, pulled on my britches (the ones that did NOT contain my wallet with my DL and CWP) and headed for the door. The clock on the wall said 12:17 a.m.

My 21 year-old son was still up playing video games and I asked him if he wanted to respond to what seemed to be an obvious break-in at my office. He quickly dropped his game controller and grabbed his Glock and we headed out the door.

Twelve urban miles, and 18 minutes later we rolled up into the parking lot and found that there was a power outage in the area; everything was pitch dark except for a few battery powered lights inside the building.

There were no police to be seen as we circled the building looking for signs of forced entry. After a few minutes, and a brief discussion between us of how neither one could prove our identity (he’d left his wallet at home too), we wondered whether we ought to back off - or go in.

That’s about the time we spotted Barney Fife’s spotlight down the street searching for the address – and going the wrong direction.

Let’s do this.

We entered the front entrance and locked the door behind us. No sense in allowing Barney to come back and enter the building behind us!

By this point the power outage is no longer even on my mind. There is sufficient lighting from the emergency lights that we can see well enough. What IS on my mind are the three previous burglaries we’ve had in the previous eight years, one of which where the burglar surgically removed a pane of glass from an out of the way spot not easily seen from the parking areas.

I disable the audible alarm and we both think we hear something in the ensuing silence. Carefully we make our way down the main hallway with flashlights and pistols at the ready.

Suddenly the power comes back on.

In a microsecond the building goes from being quiet as a tomb to the sound of dozens of printers, copiers, fax machines, and PC’s powering up. In just a second or two it registered what was happening. But for the first half of that initial second as we listened to whirring, clicking, and assorted and sundry odd sounds from all around us, there was an involuntary puckering of the anus accompanied by the hair on the back of our necks standing straight up!

We cleared the building with no further incident and locked up and left.

The police department never made an appearance, and on the way home we had a good laugh at ourselves, but for that split second we both agreed:

“That scared the sh*t outta me!”