Noise Complaint

"I'd like to file a noise complaint. There's a crying baby. It's really disruptive. Could you send an officer to check it out? Maybe he can just rock her or soothe her. Yeah, she's my baby. But she's really loud."

That was the joke Alex made last night, just before midnight. We'd already been asleep for 3 or so hours. Thing is, I really did call the police in the middle of the night. It was actually a bit of a pain in the ass. I first dialed 911, told them it was a non-emergency, then was re-routed to some answering service that provided me with a different number to dial. Then there was an automated menu, so I just pressed "0" and was then re-routed, again, back to 911 dispatchers.

I called the police for a silly reason, I suppose, but I couldn't get past the slim chance that maybe that midnight machinery was some man chainsawing his wife into easy-to-dispose-of pieces. Seriously, though, the very loud, persistent noise of a small bike engine or chainsaw or lawnmower or something woke me up in the middle of my REM last night. I couldn't fall back asleep, and my mind got to wandering, and it struck me as very odd that anyone in our sleepy little family neighborhood would be running any kind of machine in the wee hours. I thought of a million things it could be, reasonably, and then thought of a million things it was very unlikely to be, but that I would want an officer to know about. Like the chainsaw idea. Or a cement mixer. Or anything else bloody and gory that I might have once seen on Law & Order. I just wanted to report it to someone, in case it mattered. I don't want to be the person that heard the chainsaw that killed the old neighbor lady and didn't do anything about it, you know?

And then the baby woke up, crying her chant of "mamamamamamamamama." I wanted to make a noise complaint about her instead. Karma's a bitch, I guess.