The Nerd's Eye View

It was actually a dark and stormy night, believe it or not, but not sinister at all. I went to bed gratefully due to having not slept well the night before and had every intention of sleeping the whole night through. At about 4:20a my dreams were interrupted by a loud beeping. Upon awakening I discovered that the beeping was coming seemingly from everywhere at once. I stumbled bleary eyed around the apartment wondering if I was just going nuts or if in fact the fire alarms were really going off. My roommate's appearance outside his bedroom door was confirmation that the fire alarms were real.

I dressed quickly, and glanced at the rain pouring in sheets down the window, then gathered wallet and passport and marched down the stairs. With each step I was more and more aware that the sound of the alarms was fading. You couldn't hear them at all on the ground floor, and a glance at the master alarm panel showed "All systems ok - no alarms". After a momentary hesitation I walked back up the stairs, roommate in tow, and started looking for smoke, or fire, or anything at all. Risky, yes, but necessary I think.

We started deactivating the alarms (which, it turns out, were all linked together), until one last one remained. Pulling it off the ceiling we found the back of it wet. There was a leak. From the roof. It had started our alarms going off, scaring the bejeezus out of us. An inspection of the roof showed a puddle about an inch deep, smack dab in the center of the roof, around a large, poorly designed drain. It was right above our smoke detector.

Now I should point out the the area of the roof that was under water is also the second litter box for our neighbor's cat from the building next door. The cursed thing pads over and relieves itself, then tries to cover it's deed and ends up scraping away just a little bit of the weather proofing material of our roof. Hence, the large bare patch that happened to be underwater. It took an hour of bailing out in the rain and sweeping to the drain to reduce the size of the puddle and we still had a minor leak. I suppose I should be happy, after all, there was no fire. Glee.