How stupid can I get?
So can this suck any more? Come
home from spending the
weekend at my
parents'
house, I find a note and a
yellow slip stuck to my
front door. Recognising the yellow slip I start to
curse even before I finish fishing my
keys out of my
pocket. DAMN! Not another one
1!
I grab the slip, the note, open the door and enter my smallish
apartment. I try to
postpone examining the two
artifacts as long as possible, but after putting away all the stuff I brought home, I have no choice but to
read the
contents.
Damn! So much for wishful thinking. A
fine, for 150 no less! For
disturbing the peace in my
neighbourhood. Great! And I wasn't even
at home. By now I have already realised the incredibly
stupid mistake I made last
Saturday.
It involves my beautifully engineered waking-up system that turns off my
stereo set somewhere at three in the
morning2 and turns it back on again at a quarter past seven in the morning to wake me up. Having turned down the
volume to a
soft murmur only
audible in my own
room before getting into
bed, of course.
Only last Saturday I left my apartment somewhere around
dinnertime, after having
listened to some pretty
loud music. Around that time nobody is bothered anyway. The mistake lies in the
combination of not covering up the
remote I use to automatically turn on and off my stereo set (which I normally always do if I stay away overnight) and leaving the volume on the "too loud" setting.
So the scenario is this:
- Stereo set is off, but with the volume dial at "too loud"
- At the predefined time in the middle of the night, when the remote control normally automatically turns off the stereo, the remote now turns on the stereo and my CD player3 starts to play automatically
- At seven fifteen in the morning the remote automatically turns off the stereo again
- As my building is mainly occupied by students, most of my neighbours are away (at their parents' houses) for the weekend, so this goes on until finally4 on Monday morning the police are called by one of my neighbours and the notorious yellow ticket is attached to my front door
And I can't even be really pissed off with my neighbours or even with the police. The only one I can
take out to the middle of the road and shoot through the head is
myself. But this sure does suck, because I'm not that
affluent to begin with...
1 It's the same as a parking ticket, which I got two of just two weeks ago; total for those two (I got two tickets for the same offence: parking where I shouldn't have - different story) was twice 90, so: 180
2 I like to fall asleep with music, and it usually takes quite some time for me to finally fall asleep
3 CD changer, actually, capacity 5 discs at a time, so most of the time it continues playing for at least five or six hours before stopping at the end of the fifth CD
4 Either that, or the neighbours suffered two nights in row before calling the police, or, I realise now, maybe it takes a couple of phone calls to the police to land one a fine of this magnitude...