EDMOND —
What can you expect of a week that starts out with a policeman ringing your doorbell before dawn and ends with a Computer Zone technician on your doorstep delivering your no-longer-under-warranty computer with a new hard drive installed on the very day your column is supposed to be in the hands of your editor? Oh, really? What a coincidence. That’s what I expected too, and the fates lived up to my expectations.
This is not the first time I set off my burglar alarm, but it is the most noteworthy. There I stood in the wee hours of the morning, bleary-eyed and befuddled, punching stop-the-noise keys with a finger that would not, could not, find the right combination to silence the scream that was pounding in my head.
The harder I tried the more desperate I became, so of course I couldn’t remember my code name when ADT’s nice woman called ... and of course she had to phone my “key holder/responsible party” (which happens to be my daughter-in-law) and I was still assuring her I was fine when the doorbell rang. God bless the handsome young officer who stood on my front porch in full spit-and-polish blue uniform, gun snug in its holder and compassion in his smile.
I can’t tell you how much I needed that reinforcing smile. It was hours before my heart quit pounding and my ears quit ringing from the prolonged scream of the siren that had not caused Su-the-Weenie dog to so much as stir in the crate where she slept. The ENT doctor had given me a sterling report on my own hearing not a week earlier, but was my dog deaf? I had to know, so off to the vet we went. Two hours later and many dollars poorer, we arrived back at the house with, among numerous other products, a liquid whose daily application should dissolve the excessive wax in her ears. Now that I think of it, it might be a good idea to schedule a return visit with the ENT man for a new evaluation of my own post-siren-screaming hearing.
Maybe I’ll do that later, but for now I’ll just sit here rejoicing in ownership of a computer that responds quickly to my commands and no longer dishes out as many as 40 SPAM irritations at a time.
It’s been a tough week for both of us. Mac spent two nights in the computer hospital undergoing a transplant, and that must have been as uncomfortable for him as it was for me. I’ll spare you additional details of my own perilous week, but I’ve taken precautions against having another one like it. For starters, I do know my security alarm code name now, and I’m not likely to forget it.
MARJORIE ANDERSON is an Edmond resident.
Features
That shrieking alarm tolls for thee
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