On Being Responsible When Nobody Is Watching

the nastsy control panel that disturbs my slumber

The window above our heads shook violently, startling my husband and I out of deep sleeps.  We sat up in bed and listened to the frightening wind storm blowing outside.  As our eyes adjusted to the light level in the room, we noticed that both alarm clocks were flashing.  Oops; we’d lost power.  Better re-set those clocks.  I grabbed my cell phone to check the actual time and realized that I had missed a phone call that had come in at 11:30pm, and that the caller had left a voice mail message.   Uh-oh. 

I’m the first phone call our security company makes when our office is shut down and the alarms go off.  Those alarms can go off for many different reasons, but the most common one is because the equipment is old and temperamental.  I know this because I had previously responded to several alarms that turned out to be nothing.  In this particular instance I was 99% sure that it wasn’t theft but a power outage that had caused the problem.  I seriously considered blowing the whole thing off- I told myself that I could go in to the office early in the morning and reset the alarm then. My company does not mandate security systems, so if it wasn’t set for a few hours I wouldn’t be in trouble.  But my conscience wouldn’t let me rest.  What if a burglar was making away with thousands of dollars worth of equipment?  What if the building was on fire?  I decided to get dressed and drive the fifty minutes out to Akron in the middle of the night (and in the storm), just to be sure.

The drive took over an hour.  The winds were gusting at fifty miles per hour and it was raining sideways.  There were sections of the highway where it was all I could do to keep the car in its lane.  The music on my radio was interrupted by an emergency broadcast announcing a severe storm warning in a four-county area.  Geez, you don’t say.

After arriving at the branch, I quickly determined that the issue was indeed that we had lost power.  The generator was running and all doors were secure.  I reset the alarm and headed back out to my car, which was still warm inside. 

Sure, the trip was a waste and I would have been fine waiting until the morning to take care of it.  But if I had ignored that alarm there would have been some permanent damage done- not to the building, but to my opinion of myself.  When you cut corners or shirk your duties, you can’t look yourself in the mirror and say that you give your job your best effort.  And in my opinion, being able to do that is more important than a few hours of lost sleep.