For the last month or more, we have been awakened frequently by RelyCo, our security monitoring company, asking if all is well at The Hellhole because they're getting alarms. There are several odd things about this: one, every time it happens, all is quiet and serene here - no red lights, no zone breaches, no sound; two, it happens even when our system isn't armed (so it shouldn't be sending signals to RelyCo no matter what we do); three, they call reporting alarms in zones we don't have, like Zone 20 and Zone 41 - my house has only 7; fourth, it only happens between 5:50AM and 6:15AM.

The security system is more than a decade old and I figured it was a bad sensor or a loose wire, which happened about a year ago. The fact that the system needed a repair didn't bother me; it was getting wake-up calls so very early that irked me. I don't sleep that well under the best of circumstances and the calls usually startle me far enough into wakefulness that I can't get back to sleep. Alan wasn't enthused about this latest development either, since he works late a couple of days per week and consequently needs to sleep late.

Still, I hadn't bothered to do anything about it for several weeks. It wasn't an issue of money; it's always been less than a hundred bucks when they've come out to do repairs previously. I've been so very weary of upheaval, problems, having my entire world turned upside down that I simply didn't have the energy to deal with it. It's true that nowadays Alan is home more during regular business hours, but Sprocket takes VERY LOUD exception to people being in his world and Alan does tech support, so even though he might be home, he wouldn't necessarily be in a position to deal with repairmen, corral the vicious furball, etc. Further, it seemed that whenever I was at the end of my rope with the early morning false alarms, they would cease for a period of several days or a week, and even though there was no rational basis for such, I would hope fervently that whatever the problem was, it had repaired itself.

A couple of different times, I bitched remarked to Alan how weird I thought it was that the false alarms happened at roughly the same time every day. It was always around 6AM during the week and never, say, on a Saturday at 2PM when we were up and about anyway. One fine morning, I asked a lady who called from the monitoring center why this would be; she thought we were setting it off at the same time every morning when we got up and started stirring around. I don't think she believed me when I said we were always sound asleep when this occurred. Also, it kept happening even when we quit arming the system in hopes of getting a full night's sleep, which made no sense.

Last week, after over a week of blissful silence, I had three calls in one morning so I arranged to take today off, spend some time with Alan and get the darned security system repaired. This morning, sure enough the monitoring center called at 6:14AM. When the repairman arrived (not just on time but half an hour early!) he messed with the system for about 20 - 25 minutes without finding a single thing wrong, so then he quizzed me further about the issue. He, like us, thought it impossible for the system to send alarms, false or otherwise, if it wasn't even armed and this led to a suspicion.

He had to argue with the company for about half an hour but they finally realized the truth of the matter, thanks to his insistence. They had programmed another alarm entirely with our account number, and every time someone set off the alarm at Woodward Academy (nearby private school) it was showing up as coming from our house. That's why it happened about the same time every day; we're guessing Woodward rotates who has to open the school and someone in the rotation knows what he's doing so when it's his week, our alarm doesn't go off.

I feel kinda stupid putting up with it for so long when there wasn't even anything wrong with our system. When I voiced that thought, though, Alan said he hadn't really felt up to dealing with it either. I suppose it's all good since the alarm system is fine and we don't even have to pay for the service call since it was their fault. Still, I expect there is going to be quite the kerfuffle at Woodward tomorrow morning when the inept person turns off the alarm using with the wrong code (or whatever he's doing) and claxon sirens actually sound at the school.