Call the Cops!

Regarding the Park Place Community Center (PPCC) that I referenced in a post some three weeks ago, I had once again been called to serve as a network architect as there were a few more rooms in the Center that needed to be wired for Internet connections. Looking back on the sum total of my accomplishments, I would say that somebody who knew well enough what they were doing could have easily managed it in under five hours. When I finally had the last room happily pinging away, I estimate that I had probably logged somewhere between fifteen and twenty hours in the musty boardwalk that ran above the halls in the PPCC.

Eight of those hours came this Friday past when I purposed within myself to put the project for bed once and for all, little realizing how long it would take before I could call my efforts a success. The PPCC is fairly empty on Fridays, but I was loaned a key by the Center's director so that I could open any door in the joint. After a quick reconnaissance, I determined that the three rooms still in want of a working Internet connection were at just about the farthest distance possible from the boardwalk access ladder, which was in fact on the other side of the building. This proved to be a larger annoyance that one might initially think, since my primary means of checking to see if my ethernet weaving had been successful was to walk all the way down from my perch in the upstairs boardwalk down to a PC in the room. This essentially involved walking the entire length of the building twice just to check if a change I had made had been successful.

I was still in PPCC when 10:30 PM finally rolled around and something of a storm had picked up outside. As perhaps I've not yet mentioned, the Center is actually an old elementary school that was purchased by PP Church of God and re-purposed as a community center. In any event, there is something about wandering the darkened halls of an otherwise empty school building late at night during a thunderstorm that sets the imagination to flight. There was an eeriness to the environment that I chose not to notice but rather I pressed on with the task at hand, thankfully recognizing that I was nearly done. 

As I checked the connection in the last room and saw to my satisfaction that it was indeed able to access the Internet, I was startled by a loud, high-pitched beeping that began keening from across the hall. I quickly grabbed my key and walked over to investigate but by the time I opened the door and turned on the lights, the beeping had stopped. I studied the room carefully, searching for anything that might have been the cause of the disturbance, but nothing in particular caught my attention.

With a shrug and flick of my wrist, I turned off the lights and began gathering my tools to finally go home after a long day of work. I pulled my hammer, pliers, screwdrivers, and waterbottle into my backpack and looked through door at the wild weather outside. I was just musing on the unpleasant walk home that was in store for me when a black sedan pulled into the parking lot. Thinking it odd that the PPCC would have visitors so late, I peered intently through the glass of the door as the car crept slowly in my direction. Next thing I knew I was blinded by an intense beam of light. The light wasn't coming from the vehicle's headlights; this car had an auxiliary lamp that its driver had pointed directly at my face. Suddenly it dawned on me, "Oh, this is a cop."

Red backpack in hand, I pushed through the door out into the rain and said in my most disarming of folksy intonations, "Evenin'!" An officer exited the unmarked sedan and strode toward me. "What have we been doing this evening?"

There was something about the officer's choice of words that struck me as condescension and for a brief moment, I felt a flash of indignation."Well. We've been wiring up some rooms for Internet connections, I suppose."

Unmoved, the officer eyed me suspiciously. "Are you aware that you set off an alarm?"

Before I could cobble together a reasonable answer for his perfectly reasonable question, I took note of four more cop cars and an AU security vehicle pulling into the parking lot. "Oh my." was all I could think to say.

In the next moment I was flanked by a semicircle of cop cars, with all of their headlights glaring angrily at me. The AU security officer was the first to speak, "Hey, don't I know you?" 

"Um. It's certainly possible. My name is Ryan."

"Yeah, I see you around the campus! What are you doing here Ryan?"

"Well, I was doing some charitable work, really. The community center director asked me to wire some rooms for Internet and I was just finishing up."

The next officer to speak was one of the other late arrivals. "Do you know how often we get false alarms from this place?! We all had to come out here in the rain to answer this security call and this has to stop!" Gesturing to the AU guard and me the officer continued, "You people need to figure this out! We can't be coming out here all the time!" 

Between the two of us, the AU guard was the only one who was not too dumbfounded by this officer's hostile tone to feature a response: "This community center is actually owned by the church, not the school."

"Well, you're affiliated and you need to figure this out!" the officer shouted as he strode back to his car. "You all need a better system than whatever you're doing now!" As quickly as they had arrived, the Anderson cops were gone, leaving me and the AU security guard staring stupidly after them. As the red glow of the police's taillights faded down the street, the guard was again the first one to break the silence. "Man. What an a**hole."

-Ryan