A warning from beyond

For about 2 hours this morning, I was getting a very strange call at regular intervals, about 15 minutes apart. It was always the same message. Four of them were captured on my mobile's voicemail because I slept through them. It was very odd, and kind of creepy.

It was a robotic synthesized voice which said: "Calling from ### ### ####, Alert Condition Two!" and then the message would repeat.

I must have picked up the phone to hear this about 4 or 5 times.

My initial speculations and thoughts were:

• Some kind of automated marketing thing based on the first few words, though the "Alert Condition Two" didn't jibe with that.
• There was a local or state emergency, quite possibly related to the recent floods in New Hampster. That didn't make sense either, they can't call everyone... though it did make me think that perhaps I should turn on the radio just in case.
• Ah, maybe DearCloseRelative who works in Homeland Security and is sometimes prone to being a mite paranoid about such things put me on an automated warning list for impending very bad things.

When recounting the events to friends and coworkers later (after having a solution to the mystery of course) a couple initial guesses were:

• Oh, you're on that weather warning system... what was it, Nomad?
• Ah man, what the CIA is after you?

Well the solution to the mystery came after about the ninth ring when the owner of the property I rent called asking me A) if I had been getting the calls, and B) to check the basement. Ah, it all made sense. About two years ago, a pipe burst (due to the pipe-chilling cold) in the basement, flooding it and causing a lot of water damage and inconvenience. He had installed sensors and an alert dialer. Lo and behold, he programmed my number in there in addition to his; I do stuff around the property since he lives in Texas. I don't know whether he had told me and I forgotten (or wasn't paying good enough attention) or he didn't fill me in. Either way, I wouldn't have made the connection as it had never happened and I didn't know what to expect... something like "Yo man, your basement's flooded" in a synthetic voice?

Well, for a while there it was kind of suspenseful. Should it have happened a couple weeks from now, like on Halloween, it would have taken a slightly different twist in my head I'm sure.

Oh, and to alleviate frustration for the curious: No, the basement was not flooded. A de-humidifier wasn't draining properly and it overflowed causing a small puddle of water to collect. Oddly, it was not where either of the sensors were. Some sensors, eh?