Cuff Me, Officer

Ever had a police escort through a church?


I have.  


Let me explain.


Just before we moved to Los Alamos and started going to our church, they added a large addition to the building; an enormous fellowship hall upstairs and some unused space downstairs.  Unused until recently, that is. After months of negotiating, etc., the county is opening a Teen Center in that unused downstairs space.  The opening, in fact, is tomorrow!


So needless to say, there's been a lot of work going on downstairs in preparation of this opening.  I was in the church office upstairs this evening and noticed a bundle of mail that had come in for the Teen Center people.  Trying to be helpful, I thought I'd take it downstairs.  Surely, in the craziness of their opening tomorrow, no one would think to come up to check the mail.


I went downstairs and opened the interior door to the teen center and heard the loudest noise I'd heard in quite some time.


The security alarm.


Great.  


And there was, surprisingly, no one there at all.  No one to turn the alarm off.


I don't know a lot about security systems but I do know that if they go off and no one is there to disengage them immediately, the cops show up.  I thought about just staying and waiting for them with my arms behind my back in the "go ahead, officer, cuff me" position.  Instead, I hauled butt upstairs to see if our priest, who was there preparing for a contemporary worship service, knew anything about the security system.


Of course he didn't and as we were in the process of calling folks that might be able to help, the cops did, in fact, show up to the upstairs fellowship hall where we were.  

I explained that I was, in fact, the guilty party, and they asked me to guide them down to the Teen Center to check it out.  So we walked the length of the hall, right past the worship band who was completely unaware but intrigued by what was happening.  


By the time we got downstairs, the Teen Center coordinator had showed up and confirmed that he knew me and that I was not a burglar.  The cops then took off and the coordinator taught me how to disengage the security system.  


Before I departed, I handed him his pile of mail.  As I handed it over, I noticed that one of the envelopes was a bill.  From the security system company.


Oh the irony.


Keep It Real!