MAKE IT STOP!
Update: I should add a little explanation. The alarm was already going off when I got home, so I didn’t notice what started it, but by the looks of things (e.g., nothing going on), it was just a dead battery. At the time, however, I didn’t know it was battery operated. See, the other fire alarm in my apartment is wired in directly to the wall, and it’s usually triggered by smoke and heat from cooking, so I get that one to turn off by opening doors. This was clearly just a short. The ceilings are so high, that even standing on the chair, I couldn’t see inside the mechanism very well. I hopped up and twisted the main cover off, so that it was dangling like you saw in the video. It was when I was on the phone with the landlord that he instructed me to reach up again to check about the battery, since he also couldn’t remember if it was battery operated or not. That’s when I fell, and that’s when the phone went dead. When I called him back, I told him I’d prefer to just wait for someone who was either taller or had a ladder. I was thinking to myself that I didn’t really know how to sue someone, nor was I interested in doing so, and I was already a little banged up from the first attempt. I know the video is hard to watch, but I edited it to 45 minutes. In real life, this went on for the better part of an hour.
