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An alarm has been consistently sounding on the street behind my place for the past 5 minutes and is the Worst Thing
Oh, ugh, I sympathize so much.
I am the Nosy Middle-Aged White Broad of the neighborhood; when there is an alarm, I go look. It’s almost always been fine: a deaf neighbor did not realize he hit the emergency button on his car keys. Or the heat of an August afternoon cooked the house alarm until it short-circuited. Or they’re installing a new smoke detector and it’s going poorly, could I stand to one side with the flashlight?
But one time it was a real fire; and one time, the teenage daughter’s ex-boyfriend had a fistfight with the dad of the family; and one time, the family grandma’s dementia had spiked, she thought it was 1950, and she was wandering the neighborhood looking for some white folks who would pay her a few dollars to clean for them.
Three genuine emergencies in nineteen years, that’s not a bad record. I figure the point of an alarm is for someone to come asking if things are okay, and probably best if that’s a harmless-looking sympathetic person.
So I reblogged this earlier but a short story; PLEASE be nosy as hell.
A couple years ago I slipped in some ice in the far end of a parking lot, cracked my wrist and sprained my ankle. I was unable stand due to the ice and my hand, I couldn’t crawl back to my car to get my phone. It was bitterly cold out and I was lying on the ground for a good half hour. All I could do was scream.
I don’t know how long I would have been out there if the guy at the Jimmy John’s hadn’t come out because he thought he heard something and decided to investigate.
It’s very probably nothing, but in case it’s not, it’s better to be a mildly annoying neighbor than the person who ignored an emergency.
I have a lot of drunk people passing through our street. I hear screams and songs and yelps and I always have a moment of panic that it’s actually someone in trouble.
But then someone once really did scream because they were being hurt and I was the only one in the whole neighborhood to go check it out. Sure it’s scary, but it’s either do something about it, or know deep inside that someone out there needed help and you chose to ignore it.
If getting out there in the middle of the night really scares you (I don’t blame you) at least call the cops so they can check it out. Do something.
I would add that if it is a real emergency and there are already emergency services there–an ambulance or a fire truck or whatever seems pertinent to the issue–you don’t need to intervene. The urge to go help however you can is strong, but bystanders trying to interject themselves into an emergency can actually have the exact opposite effect. There’s a reason that, for example, off-duty EMTs are not supposed to stop and help at a car crash if there’s already a rig there, sufficiently well-staffed to manage the situation, and the reason is that even someone well trained will probably just be in the way after a certain point.
That being said, please, god, go check if you hear an alarm or yelling or something. Either you’re going to genuinely help someone or you’re just going to go back to whatever you’re doing. It’s a no-lose scenario for you.
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