Do You Hear a Ringing?

Sweet, sweet silence. There’s nothing like it, especially when you’ve spent your entire weekend being unjustly punished with a shrill, piercing alarm.
When I got home from work on Friday, the building was filled with a cicada-like ringing emanating from the service closet. I shed my purse and grocery bags and went back to the closet, where I was assaulted by a rapid beeping emanating from our building’s alarm system. I’m still not sure what happened, but apparently the phone lines connecting our fire alarm to our alarm management company were disconnected, and the alarm box was panicking (quite unnecessarily, in my mind). I tried multiple ways of reconnecting the line, including inspecting and jiggling the phone lines and resetting the breaker, but nothing doing. I called my landlady, reported the problem to her answering machine, and hoped that the noise would soon stop.
Unfortunately, my landlady must have been on vacation, because the alarm continued to sound all through the weekend. While most of the residents could probably block out the noise in their apartments, I was not so lucky, since the alarm box hangs on the opposite side of a wall in my apartment. I actually became edgy – the ringing began to penetrate my subconscious, and by Monday morning I was starting to hear the ringing when I was miles away from my apartment.
After work on Monday, I entered my building and stood still for a few seconds. Something was missing. It was noise. Our maintenance man had been there, and had somehow placated the beeping box. As I stood there, I felt as though a boulder that had been sitting on my shoulders had suddenly rolled off. Oh, lovely silence.