Fire Dept

Before I tell you about our Father's Day, let me tell you about our excitement a couple weeks ago with the fire alarm.....

So apparently our room has been having problems with notifing the front desk that our fire alarm is going off when it isn't and that people are calling 911 when they are not.  Yeah, it's great fun.

So my phone in the room rings.  I pick it up.  "This is the front desk, are you alright?" Um...yeah, pretty sure I'm fine, why?  "Well, your fire alarm is going off."  Um...nope, pretty sure it's not.  "Well, open your windows and make sure to keep your room well ventilated when you're cooking."  Yeah, thanks, but I'm not cooking.

Couple days later....Ring ring....yeah, exact same conversation.

A day or two after that....ring ring...I pick up the phone "Lemme guess, this is the front desk, and no, I am not cooking, and yes we are fine."  Oh, good, but someone dialed 911 from your room and we were just calling to make sure you're fine.  What?!  Nope, sorry, wrong room.  We were ALL in the kitchen cutting up strawberries and my kids don't even know where the phone is in this room.  We have it tucked back behind Jaeger's bed and they'd have to crawl across our bed and get in a little corner to reach it and they have no interest in it anyway.  PLUS, you'd have to dial 9 first then 911 so I can guarantee you my kids didn't call 9-9-1-1.  "Well, we have to send the police up to your room just to make sure you are fine."  WHAT?!  NO ONE CALLED!!!  But whatever, if it makes you feel better.... So a couple mins later...knock knock...open the door to nice front desk guy Eric and a Chicago policeman.  "Everything ok?....Uh...yeah...that's what I just told ya..."

So I called the manager later in the day to have a little conversation with her about checking the wiring in my room to the front desk.  Someone ELSE prob called 911 and is DYING in their room while they insist that I called.  They even tried to say that it was no big deal and that it happens all the time when people try to dial out bc you have to dial 9 and then 1 before the area code...I'm like I DIDN'T USE the phone, nor have I ever used the phone!!

So that brings me to our next (and biggest) incident.  During the night...yes, 3:30am..we were jolted out of bed by the sound of the fire alarm.  The ear-piercing, head-exploding, so-loud-you-think-it's-going-to-make-you-deaf fire alarm.  We instantly think it's our alarm since we've had that history of the mysterious alarm so right away I get a towel and wave it back and forth by the alarm trying to make it go off.  Then after I realize which alarm is going off, (not the smoke detector, the actually alarm on the wall), I open our door to find that the hallway alarms are going off as well.  I call the front desk (bc that's what the instructions on our door say to do) and of course no one answers.  Tiernan is crying...which stopped soon...and Nathan has his hands over Jaegers ears.  The other kids put a pillow over their head and went back to sleep :)  I put on my flip flops and head downstairs to see what's going on and if we actually need to evacuate. 

As I'm making my way to the stairwell, people start slowly coming out of their room and heading downstairs as well.  No one knows what's going on.  Then I hear the sirens.  Firetrucks fill the parking lot and fireman start fairly quickly heading inside.  I look down the hallway and notice smoke.  Then I learned that someone was cooking and apparently started a fire.  He put out the fire before fireman arrived but it caused lots of smoke.  Most people were evacuating the hotel who were already downstairs.  I asked a fireman if we need to get outside and he said "for now, yeah".  I told him that I have children upstairs and asked that if I should go get them.  he asked if someone was with them, I said my husband, and he said that I could just go back up there and wait since they were almost done, they just needed to bring the machine in to get all the smoke out.

So as I made my way back upstairs (with the alarm STILL piercing my ears), I asked another fireman in the stairwell when they were going to shut off the alarm.  He turned to me and said "I hope, like, NOW!"  Apparently he was sick of it too :)  So I made it back to the room, told Nathan it wasn't a big deal, and then picked up Jaeger and brought him with me to the stairwell.  It was the only place that didn't have alarms in it.  I just held him and we hung out there, with another family with kids, until the alarm was shut off.  Once they FINALLY stopped, we went back to the room and tried to fall back asleep, which was kinda hard to do since it was now 4:30 and our alarm goes off at 5:30....Hopefully there will be NO more alarms!