Wednesday afternoon I needed to pick up copies of the house key - I had left the original at the locksmith’s that morning as the copies had to be hand cut.
When I returned home, Uncle Joe was on the phone with Uncle Bud…Uncle Bud (the 96 year-old) had driven down to his house about ten houses down the road to do his shredding. (Someone told him that his identity could be stolen from his mail so he shreds his mail - all of it - even the catalogs - the whole catalogs - and he gets a four inch stack of mail everyday.) When Uncle Bud punched in his alarm code, it didn’t register and the siren went off. He couldn’t get it to stop going off. When the alarm company called, he understood them to tell him to pull it off the wall, so he yanked the entire keypad out of the wall.
So I get home and Uncle Joe is telling Phyllis, his aide, to walk down and sort everything out because the police are probably on their way and he doesn’t want them carting Uncle Bud off to jail. I got the stroller and walked down with her. On the way, George, the mailman (who stops in every afternoon for a piece of cake and a glass of milk), stopped us and said he had tried disconnecting the battery from the alarm, but that hadn’t helped, so he had flipped the main circuit breaker to shut off the alarm. Phyllis and I arrive and Uncle Bud is going on and on about how he now has no power. I flip the breaker and all is fine for 60 seconds, and then the siren starts to wail again. I turn off the breaker, I talk to the alarm people who say that his system is old and they’ll need to send out a sales rep next week to give him a bid for a new system. I ask them to please send someone out now so that Uncle Bud can have power in his house. She transfers me to someone else who says someone will be out the next day at 2pm.(No one shows.) I go in the house and look at all of the outlets in the house for the plug to the alarm. Can’t find it. By the way, Uncle Bud’s house has the wall colors from the 1960s and could be a designer house today. Phyllis asks what’s behind a door in the garage, the one place I hadn’t looked because the baby was beginning to fuss and there was a ladder against the door. She moved the ladder, we peeked in, and there was the alarm plug. I had to find a screwdriver to unplug it from the outlet, did so, Uncle Bud is still going on and on about the house not having power and what is he going to do and that awful noise, I flipped the breaker back on, and presto - lights with no siren going off. Uncle Bud was amazed. I am now the cat’s meow. Kendall, Phyllis and I walked home.