A Night Out Is Cause for Alarm

Patsy and Peaches have the same reaction to the sound of our burglar alarm. They both run around in tight circles and scream. Maybe it’s because they are both small and blond. Actually, I don’t like the sound either, but I stoically endure it because three of us running around screaming is too awful to contemplate.

The noise is dreadful. It’s supposed to be. It was not designed to play a soothing lullaby so the hypothetical burglar will be calm while he is stealing my plastic plates left over from frozen dinners and other valuables.

The sound the burglar alarm made the other evening was not as horrendous as usual. It was only about half-decibel. It is the sound it makes when the power fails.

I was looking forward with great anticipation to an award dinner I was planning to attend. The honorees, Jack Jones of The Times and CBS’ Bill Stout, were two men I have known and liked for a long time, and the master of ceremonies, Warren Olney, was a through-fire-and-flood comrade. He gave me my first ride in a Volkswagen in Sacramento in the worst storm of the season.

I was also looking forward to seeing Bill Boyarsky, the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi, which was having this fete. In addition to this cast of players, I was going to be seated with NBC’s Jess Marlowe, with whom I have marched up and down several political hills, an acid test of friendship, and he had passed with highest honors.

That’s five men I like and five good reasons to attend this ceremony. Of course, there were women of distinction there too, but it happened to be the men with whom I had ridden the press buses, sung roundelays on media planes and nearly contracted scurvy from a diet of pressroom sandwiches.

Besides all that, I had a new dress.

I was just getting into the shower when the lights around my bathroom mirror went out, and the burglar alarm began a high whining sound like a cageful of distraught gerbils. “Ah, hah,” I thought, “one of those switch things in that little cupboard in the garden tool closet has turned itself the wrong way.”

In order to look inside that little cupboard, it is necessary to balance yourself on the electric lawn mower, which takes up most of the space. When I got out there and opened the door to the tool closet, it was as dark as the inside of a derby hat. I backed out and tried to remember where the flashlight was.

While I was wandering around looking for a flashlight, it occurred to me that maybe the power in the whole house was out. It was. I called the neighbor up the hill and she said that her lights were just fine. Of course. She wasn’t trying to get dressed and go someplace.

I found a flashlight under a bed and went to the phone again. The noise of the alarm was beginning to upset my normal unruffled calm.

I called the alarm company and there was no answer. How can this be, I thought. They are supposed to be my 24-hour sentry and they’ve gone out for happy hour.

I then fished around in the alarm file, calling every number on every scrap of paper. I finally reached an old friend named Bob Jenisson at another company who told me to look in the alarm box, which is in the furnace room cum broom closet. This means standing on the tool box, leaning as far to the left as possible and aiming the flashlight at the box. I went back and told Bob the names and numbers on the alarm thing.

Then Bob said, “There’s a switch on the left. Go move it.” I couldn’t.

Then Bob, good boy, said he’d send someone out to turn it off. Then Patsy came home, and she and Peaches started their mad tarantella.

Finally, a nice young man from Bob’s company came out and shut the thing off. About then the lights came on again. I had given up on the dinner long before.

I later called my alarm company and they answered. Their telephone system is dependent on power and they were in the same trough of darkness as I was.

The next day, they sent a young man who connected all the itty-bitty wires and connected me to the mainframe thing again.

And that is why I didn’t get to see Bill or Warren, or the other Bill, or Jack or Jess.