The day I set off a burglar alarm…

...ya, you read the title right…yet another major goof up which makes me go ROFL whenever I think of it, but scared me to death when it actually happened.

Last Sunday the wireless adapter of my laptop went kaput and I was running about the house and trying to get it to work...but it just wouldn’t. As it was already evening and the shops would be closed, I could do nothing further that day.

It was a long agonizing wait for Monday evening to rush to the shop to buy a new wireless adapter, and I couldn’t wait to get home after making the purchase; I walked as quickly as I could to get home and chose ‘The Shortcut’.

The Shortcut -  A store ‘TKMax’ is situated at the farther end of the Orchard Square shopping center. We can walk into the store, enter it and immediately exit through the other set of doors to save, well, almost 0 distance and 0 time. I have no idea why I feel it is a ‘Shortcut’ and always end up using this route.

So far so good till last Monday…

I approached the store – The Shortcut, happily swinging the carry-bag with the wireless adapter in it, when suddenly a guy overtook me. I was a bit annoyed but I continued walking into the store right after this guy. No sooner had that guy and then immediately I entered the store, than the burglar alarms went off and a Salesperson approached the guy. He immediately said, ‘I just entered the store’ and she nodded and went off. She did not approach me, but I had a gut feeling that it was something on me that had caused the alarm to go off...most probably the damn wireless adapter.

Fine, now I think that the adapter could’ve caused the alarm to go off; now how the hell do I get out of the store? I had assumed that the guy was also using the store as a shortcut, but he apparently wasn’t and no one else had gotten that great, amazing idea. Here I was, stuck in the store like an idiot, fully knowing that if I exit the store, the burglar alarms might set off again. I cursed myself a thousand times for taking idiotic decisions and just stood flabbergasted between the two doors, occasionally staring at the second door – my door to freedom!

A thought, with no apparent logic, struck me that maybe it WAS that guy who caused it, maybe I was scared for nothing…now my biggest fear was that since almost everyone at the store had noticed me entering it, if they saw me exiting almost immediately, they would probably say that using the store that way was not allowed and I would be forever banished from my beloved shortcut.

So now all I had to do was linger around the store for some time and then make way for the exit, so I just walked around the store, dazed, for about 5 minutes and made way for the exit and…

The alarm went off again.

This time, it was only me at the exit and I almost turned into a stone, facing the inside of the store, waiting for a Salesperson to come and start interrogating me. Of course a chant of curses on myself was running through my head.

The lady asked me if I bought anything from the store…I spat out a ‘No’ and in a zombie-like way outstretched my hand with the carry-bag dangling between my fingers and broke into a sweat. The lady peeped inside the bag, saw the box and said ‘Oh! That thing might have set it off!’ and what she said/ did next were drowned in my relief. The next thing I knew, I was almost 10 feet away from the store, walking on the street.

I thank my stars that, that day I was ‘lazy’ enough and excited enough not to put the carry bag in my backpack, else…gulp!