The alarm on the roof

A few days ago I walked into my office in the physics department and faintly heard some sort of alarm going off - Beep Beep Beep Beep – like a truck was backing up outside. I ran off to do some tutorials and came back about three hours later, and the alarm was still sounding. “How annoying” I thought, “must be something about the construction outside”.

The next day, I had a short meeting in my office with my grad student, Simon, and the sound was still there. It was still rather quiet, but nonetheless distracting as we tried to focus on physics. I kept looking out the window to see what that damn noise was. Simon suggested that since we couldn’t see the source of the sound outside, maybe it was coming from the roof. Hmm… an alarm on the roof. How strange.

Well, the next day I walked into my office and the alarm was still going. I finally decided that I had to investigate. I opened the window and stuck my head out into the cold to look around. I immediately discovered that in fact the sound was not any louder outside, rather it was much less loud. Scratching my head for a second, I concluded that the noise was coming from inside my office. A few minutes of Sherlock-Holmes-ing, and I found the culprit: My phone was off the hook. I should have been suspicious that no one had called me in a few days. Beep Beep Beep. Now I know what British phones sound like when they are left off the hook.