Beep. Beep. Beep.

My alarm rang at 7am and the thought crossed my mind to call in sick after last night's interrupted sleep.

Running in the evening leaves me a bit wired so I end up sleeping later than my usual midnight. This being the case, I turned in around 1am, only to be awoken an hour later by my brother clomping up the stairs from the basement to complain that our home alarm system was going off. It was not the loud, obnoxious siren that signals a breach of security, but an irritating, incessant, high-pitched beeping coming from the basement.

The "Trouble" light was on but there was no trouble to be found and punching in the code for the system didn't do the trick. After about10 minutes of frustrated swearing and hitting of buttons, the beeping stopped and we returned to bed. 15 minutes later, the beeping began again. This time around, my mother and I ignored it and left my brother to deal with it.

I considered getting up to help, but what could I do? I figured it was about time he took some responsibility around the house anyway, and acted like a man instead of a baby. And he dealt with it. He called the alarm company, and around 3am, the beeping stopped. He came upstairs to tell me to re-set my clock since he had to flip the switch in the fuse box to stop the beeping, and that was that. The silence of the night reined again.