| For some reason for where I work I'm on the alarm code list. So every time there's a false alarm I invariably get called, because although I'm not the only person on the list I'm apparently the only one on it that can use a phone to receive incoming calls. About every two months when a homeless person pisses on the front door at the right angle, the alarm goes off and I get a lovely phone call, typically at four in the morning, telling me that the alarm has gone off at the building and the police have been dispatched and they want me to go meet them. In reality I usually don't meet them, I beat them there by about ten minutes even though I live 20 minutes away and was roused out of a dead sleep. I've been suggesting for years that all we have to do to stop all these false alarms is to metal plates around the corners of the entrance and run about 15,000 volts through them. Then whoever arrives first the next morning just needs to grab a pitchfork and toss the bodies into the street where they can be picked up by the garbage men, or the street sweeper. Nobody listens to my ideas though. They just give me strange looks and avoid me for a few weeks. So this last Saturday I get a call from the alarm center so I drive down to work, exactly what I wanted to do Saturday night. The standard procedure is I get there, talk to the cop, or wait for the cop to show up and then talk to him, check the doors, go inside take a quick look around, reset the alarm and leave. That's what normally happens, except for the time when there was a shots fired down the street from the building at around the same time and we had to search the whole place looking for an armed fugitive. That was fun. As I pulled up to the building Saturday I didn't see any cops around which is nothing unusual. As soon as I parked however I spotted a cop car parked about half a block down the street, I wasn't quite sure why he was parked way the hell down there. I got out of my car thinking that the cop would come over and we'd check out the building to make sure everything was secure. Instead, he drove the fuck away. I guess my imposing figure and body language are as such that they convey that I'm capable of taking care of anyone that might be hiding in the building waiting to kill me. Thank you Pittsburgh Police Force.
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