North door

Got to the office yesterday morning, rather tired and lacking sleep (got home from my trip in the wee hours of the morning), and not looking forward to the morning full of teleconferences. To my surprise they were all canceled -- but I wasn't to get the time back for other work.

My cellphone rang, and though it wasn't a number I recognized I thought I'd better answer it.

The alarm company was calling to tell me the burglar alarm at the church had gone off on the north door, the sheriff was or would be there shortly, and would I or somebody else come over? I'm only a few minutes away, so I went. (I guess my name was still on the call list from the time the alarm was installed.) I didn't have Fr. Davis' number on my cellphone so I called Kathy, she relayed the information, and diverted to come over also.

When I got there the sheriff was parked in the lot. He said he'd walked around and had seen nothing. I walked around too, starting with the northernmost door (on the Fr. Leen Education Center building) and continuing all around. Everything looked fine except that it appeared somebody had tried to jimmy the Parish Hall door open. The sheriff said he that was old because there were no paint chips on the ground.

The only things out of the ordinary were the sheriff's "false alarm" tag on the Narthex door and an "attempted UPS delivery" tag on the door to the office.

Kathy & I unlocked the building and walked through -- everything was in place. A puzzler, and I still wondered about the north door (because the list of alarmed locations did not include a "north door"), but there was nothing else to do so we locked up and left.

A little while later Fr. Davis called and said he thought he had figured it out: the alarm had gone off within a very few minutes of the attempted delivery. The deliveryman must have tried to open the Narthex door, accidentally setting off the alarm. (If the door wasn't closed properly there might have been enough play to allow that.)

Then the rest of it came to me. The person at the alarm company probably didn't know the word "Narthex," so she substituted "North."