Ask Me What's Wrong

The thunderstorm was so bad on early Tuesday morning that it cause my entire building to plunge into darkness when the lightning struck the top of the building. I realised how rarely thunder and lightning occurs around here in Melbourne that night when it just dawned upon me that it had been ages since I had witnessed a thunderstorm like this.

I just felt I wasn't as used to it as I had been before.

I shall take this opportunity to state a not-very-useful-but-quite-intriguing piece of information which is that Singapore has one of the highest lightning fatalities record in the world. You would think that with all the high-rise buildings scattered around Singapore, the lightning would be more likely to strike the buildings than people.

I pity the other students living here who had exams later that day. Hopefully they relied on battery operated alarms.

My neighbour resorted to studying by the corridor lights for her exam later that day when the back-up generator kicked in to power up the security lights. She claimed that she just started studying just 20 minutes before the power went out. She was comtemplating if she could cite "power failure" as a reason for getting a special consideration on her exam.

I wasn't in my room when the power failure had occured and so I couldn't get back into my room due to the electronically operated keycard access system.

I finally got into my room when the maintenance guy Russ brought up the key to let me into my room. It took me quite some time to make my way down to the lobby because everything was pitch black. Only a couple of dimly-lit security lights were powered. My imagination really kicks in when I'm in a situation that vaguely resembles a scene from a horror movie. My brain is pretty screwed up like that.

I couldn't sleep and so I started to watch House on my laptop. I could hear heater come back to life when the power came back on. The clock on the microwave had been reset. I got up to try my lights but they didn't work. My Internet and phone still weren't working too.

I finally gave in at around 5:30am in the morning. My lights still weren't working when I got up at 12 noon. I was awoken by the persistent sounds of someone trying in vain to open my door. At first I thought it might be the maintanence guy trying to fix my lights, but there had been no knocking whatsoever and it was taking wayyyyyyy too long for someone to open a stupid door. I stumbled out of bed and opened my friggin door only to find an embarassed Indian-looking guy. He apologised to me saying that he had mistaken my room for his room. I slammed the door on him without saying a word.

And I thought the 4am pre-dawn fire alarms were irritating.

This place never fails to keep me on my toes for more suprises.

Today it sounded at 2am and lasted for 16 friggin minutes.

I wouldn't be so annoyed if there was actually a real fire or at least a bloody hint of smoke.

This time I really pitied the hotel guests on my level who didn't have a clue of what to do and where to go to evade from the deafening siren in their rooms.

No announcements were made. No one was informed of what was going on.

At least this time the fire trucks didn't turn up.