Five days.
Well, most of five days. Labor Day weekend here in the US. A holiday to relax.
Friday night it began. MEEPMEEPMEEP! MEEPMEEPMEEP! Piercingly loud. An alarm from the locked utility room directly underneath our condo. How loud? The length of the parking lot, around the circle, the length of another parking lot, inside a condo building, someone called us about the noise. LOUD.
Not every 30 or 60 seconds, like a dying-battery smoke alarm, but constant. MEEPMEEPMEEP about every two seconds.
All night Friday. All day and night Saturday. All day and night Sunday. Monday morning…then it stopped.
Until sundown Monday. Then MEEPMEEPMEEP all night. Tuesday it began around suppertime.
No one answering at the management company. No one answering the emergency line. No one calling back or coming out in response to messages left at the emergency line.
The condo board president came over Monday and tried his key, but the deadbolt key had been broken off in the upper lock. Tuesday the management company called another board member, who became confused somehow and told them the wrong building. …never mind that we’d specified the building number in messages we’d left…so they closed the ticket or something and did not fix it.
Finally tonight the condo board president came out with a locksmith. The locksmith couldn’t get in. Eventually the president tried all his keys…gave up, went home to get MORE keys, and found the one that worked.
The offending device was indeed a smoke detector, but not a battery-powered one, a sealed one. He had to pry it open and cut some wires.
At last, blessed quiet.
And in three more days of work, we finally get a weekend! Not a three-day, of course.