Page 307 - NIXBOOK

A Canadian woman calls our local 911, quite perplexed that an online search of herself shows that she owns property in Poulsbo
where she has never lived. I call her back. She has questions. I have no answers. I direct her to the county government website,
which shows the property owner is in fact somebody else. I suggest the weird search result was probably a scam to get her to
pay money for more information. She scoffed. I insisted it was scam. I still can’t believe she called 911 from another country to
ask a police officer questions about that.

It’s 1 am and I’m sound asleep because I have to go into work extra early at 3 am and so I took a sleeping pill which is working
great but now I’m getting disturbed because a siren is blaring nearby; must be an aid car responding to a medical emergency,
but it sounds really close like it’s in my neighborhood. Which is weird, because the aid crews don’t use their sirens in residential
areas, especially in the middle of the night. I’m still half asleep, siren is louder than ever, it must be a police pursuit coming
through the area. A few seconds go by and my brain is struggling to overcome the sleeping pill, the siren is now very loud and
it sounds like a pursuit has ended literally in my driveway because that’s where the siren is. I stagger awake and go to the nearest
window and look outside. No police cars or stolen cars or fleeing suspects or police activity in sight, only my police car parked
in the driveway. With the siren on, full blast. I then wake up fully, and in complete horror realize that yes, it is my goddamn
siren that is on, and I am acutely aware that in the 20-acre housing development that I am almost right in the middle of, there
are 183 other houses surrounding mine. No time to put on clothes, I grab a bathrobe and run out to my car. Fumble with the
remote control way too much. Finally get in, and stare in panic at the siren controls because this is a brand new make and model
of patrol car for me. I fumble in the darkness and finally manage to turn the siren off, and the echoes of it bouncing off 183 other
houses fades into nothing. What the fuck happened? Well we figured out later that if the siren switch is physically moved back
and forth quickly (which I had done on my previous shift while responding to something important) the relay switches can’t
keep up and the siren will turn “off” even when clicked onto an “on” setting. No big deal until you add in a new feature that our
patrol cars got; which was an auto-on engine function, designed for saving gas. Specifically, an officer could go to a scene – like
at an accident – and turn off the engine, but leave all the emergency lights flashing to alert and detour traffic. They would run
on battery power alone, and when the battery got low, the engine would automagically turn on and recharge, and then later
turn off again, allowing the lights to run for hours and hours without running the engine the whole time. Super nifty. Unless the
engine turns itself on at 1 am to top off the battery, and the siren switch was inadvertently left in an “on” position. Then the siren
will kick on and wake everybody the fuck up. So there I was, sitting my in patrol car in the dark, having just managed to turn off
the siren. I was completely drenched in sweat, heart pounding, pretty much completely horrified. I looked out the windshield
and saw, to my complete dismay, my neighbors across the street out on their porch. Looking at me like WTF. I turn my head
and the house next to me, yep, those folks are also outside staring at me. I turn the other way, there are more residents outside
staring at me. I slink down in my seat and try to calm down. Eventually everybody goes back into their houses. When I peek
around and see nobody is watching anymore, I go back inside and try to relax. Impossible, of course. I actually tried to fall back
to sleep but that was not going to happen because I thought “what if that siren goes off AGAIN?” and the more I thought about
it, like leaving a toaster plugged in, I had to go back outside and confirm the GD siren was off. Went back inside, another 30
minutes later I had to go outside again to double confirm. I think I went there a total of three more times after the first time.
The only good part about that whole thing was that there were 2 other police officers living in that neighborhood, so except for
the people on my part of the street, everybody else would not have known for sure which one of us was the offender. Also, I’ll
point out that the entire neighborhood was crime free that night. I also wondered for how long that siren had been going until
I heard it? The next day, one of my coworkers who lived a street over said it had been on for well over a full minute.