The Great Awakening

The title sounds a lot more literary than the story really is. So I have 8 AM classes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays which is a problem since I am not exactly a morning person. So Monday night I was up way too late since I slept until about noon that day. It was about 2 AM by the time I actually got into bed. I tossed and turned and tossed some more. Point being I didn't fall asleep. I figured it was too late to try and take a Tylenol PM to help so I just tried my best to fall asleep but apparently my best was not good enough. 3 AM came and went with no sleep. Then around 4 AM I hear a bunch of men in the stairwell. One must understand that there are mostly all college students in this building from one university or another so I just figured some other guys were coming back from a bar awfully late. However the noise and loud French speaking persisted.

Then, out of nowhere, came quite hard pounding on the door over and over. Again, I just figured it was some drunk kids being typical drunk kids so I did not bother to get up. While in college you tend to learn a sense of whether the type of knocking is important or not. My judgment was to obviously stay in bed even though I wasn't sleeping. Then I began to hear some new voices which I thought was weird but I figured the drunk kids went to another door and somebody opened it. It was not until I started to hear English being spoken that my interest in the situation suddenly rose. I listened as best I could from my bed but I could not make out what was being said but it sounded like some of the other American students who were talking. So I put my clothes on and went to the door to see what was going on. I opened the door to see a flashlight greeting me in the face and somebody saying the police are here and something about checking the rooms and something about water on the floor. I was understandably a bit confused and a bit annoyed there was a flashlight in my face.

Turns out some room one floor below mine had water on the floor or damp walls. The person obviously couldn't wait until the morning so they called the fire department to come check it out at 4 AM. Also turns out that those crazy drunk kids were actually firefighters who wanted to check my room for water; and that whoever told me the police were here mistranslated the word "pompier" on the back of the jackets of the firefighters. They must have been confused with the French translation of police, being "la police." I could see where somebody might get thrown off by the "la." The French firefighters who did not speak a word of English left at 4:45 AM and concluded in fine French fashion that they didn't know where the water was coming from so they were leaving. It must have been the end of their shift.

If I could just interject some of my plumbing expertise here. The room on the 2nd floor had wet walls or wet ceiling or something. So the firefighters came to the 3rd floor to see where the water was coming from. No problem there except for the time of day. One of the rooms on my floor had water on the floor of their closet and their closet walls were also wet. Common sense would say, well go up one more floor and maybe you can find what caused it because the last time I checked water doesn't exactly flow up a wall. I guess common sense wasn't so common as they say because the firefighters were content with saying "well we tried, can't find anthing wrong, lets go."

I ended up not going to sleep that night since I had to get up at 6:30 for my 8:00 AM class. I also had 7.5 hours of class the next day. Not really a good combination but I managed to make it through the day. One thing I did end up learning, my judgment of the importance of who is knocking, is bit off.