Holli Rausch

It’s 4:00 AM. I wake up to the flashing lights and loud buzzing of the fire alarm. Being the duty RA, I grab my glasses, cell phone, and keys and run to the first floor. I know that there are no other RA’s in the building, so I begin looking for the alarm box key to silence the sound for at least a little while. As I search, I begin to look up my RD’s (Mandy’s) phone number in my cell because I thought she was out of town. I turn around and she’s standing there. I say, “Thank God you’re here!” She hands me the master key and I go knocking and unlocking doors on 1st floor. At this point, we can’t do anything but assume this is real. Girls (and their guy friends) are coming out of their rooms and down the stairs grumpily as I think, “Your lives may be in danger right now and all you can do is whine?!”

I get half-way through knocking and unlocking my floor (2nd floor) when Mandy comes up and says, “It’s on this floor!” We check all of the pull alarms, but none have been triggered. Mandy then says, “We need to check the discs in the ceiling of every room.” We don’t know what we’re looking for, because we’ve never had it happen from a room before. We start checking and finally find a room that has a disc missing. The resident and her boyfriend were still in the room, which is in violation of fire alarm policy, but they helped us a lot so I guess it was kind of a blessing. We found something that looked like it might be the disc. It was bent, but the guy bent it back and stuck it in the ceiling. He twisted it and it seemed to lock in place.

Mandy went downstairs and silenced the alarm, sending girls back to bed. It never went off again. One and a half hours later, I finally fall back to sleep. That’s what I call a great Saturday night!