That time I had to call the police while on retreat

Yup, you read right.  I had to call the police this past Sunday morning at 12:15 am while on a confirmation retreat with 40 tweens. Totally what I would prefer to do instead of sleep.

The retreat was held at this big, brand-new high school and we had it all to ourselves for the weekend.  Along with the facility came the responsibility of having to turn off the alarm at night so the alarm/motion detection sensors would not go off.  Lucky.me.

Saturday evening before the maintenance guy left he gave me thorough instructions on how to turn the alarm off at midnight: punch in the code and hit enter; sounds easy enough!  Lights out was at 11pm but being I had the special alarm job I needed to stay up to midnight to make sure the alarm situation was fine n' dandy.  So what did I do with the remaining hour of time? Well of course I raided the fridge for some leftover pizza and checked out happenings on Instagram.

As midnight approached I waited with baited breath to set the alarm so I could finallyyy go to sleep.

So its midnight.  I am typing in the code and punching enter.  It would be wayy to easy for it to work the first time, so after multiple attempts of punching in the code with it not working I proceeded to freak.the.freak.out.  On the screen it kept flashing "INVALID CODE". Oh and did I mention at by this time the alarm automatically was armed, which meant I was standing as still as a statue against the wall so as to not set off the alarm.  Insert another freak-out.

So I tried calling the maintenance guy but no such luck.  I called Jim (guess for moral support?) but the sleeping bear didn't answer.  So I called another friend, and in the middle of that realized my phone battery was like 10%.  Perfect.

I realized it was not physically possible for me to sleep standing up so I decided to go call the police.  Earlier that day the maintenance man told me he had already called the police to let them know of the school had alarms issues this weekend to not send a car to investigate because it would have been caused by our group.  So after my first call attempt to the police was dropped, I tried again and was transferred to a dispatch.  I explained the whole story including the my fear of waking up 50 people sleeping and the growing tiredness from standing still for going on 30 minutes.

The officer explained that if the alarm went off he would still need to send a car out to check the school and speak in person with me to ensure all was well. Not really the answer I wanted.

So I decided I no longer cared if I woke up 50 people with a screeching alarm, I needed to go get some sleep.  I began to walk away from the alarm.  Sure enough, the motion sensors picked up me walking and a humming noise began to grow.  I walked back to the alarm and with one final attempt plugged in the code.  By some miracle, it worked.  I turned off the alarm without waking up 50 people or needing the police come to rescue me from the evil clutches of the alarm system.

To say I was thrilled is an understatement.

I proceeded to happily skip down the hall and crawl into my sleeping bag. I am really glad we have the police available to come help at any time of the day or night, but I was realllyyy glad they didn't have to come help me turn off the alarm in the middle of the night.

Pay attention if someone ever has to teach you to set an alarm, ya never know when you could end up in a similar situation! ;)