Every morning I wake up to the same ear-piercing beeping noise. Friday morning, when the beeping began, I reached for my phone to turn the alarm off like I do every morning. To my surprise, it wasn’t my alarm. More surprisingly, it was 6 a.m., not 10 a.m.

Puzzled by the unknown noise and now fully awake, I quickly realized there was probably some correlation between the smell of smoke and the noise.

Knowing that none of my roommates would be up burning a breakfast at six, I was a little worried.

I went to my door and touched the handle to see if it was hot because my elementary school had a great fire safety program.

Anyway, the door handle wasn’t hot so I proceeded into the hallway. There was no sign of fire there; so, I headed downstairs.

Our entire living room was filled with thick, gray smoke. Contemplating whether I should crawl on the ground or not (which we also learned in elementary school), I made my way to the kitchen.

There it was — a pan on the stove cooking on high heat with what was once eggs inside and no one in sight.

I turned the stove off, went back to my room, sent a rude text message to my top two suspected culprits and went back to sleep.

Later, after further analyzing the situation, I came to the conclusion that my room is the farthest room from the smoke alarm. Yet, I was the only one out of about 10 people who heard it.

Luckily, I was the only one who hadn’t gone out the night before. So, I was the only one who wasn’t passed out in drool with a mysterious man sleeping next to me.

Ever since I realized it’s almost impossible to discuss poetry in Spanish with a hangover, Thursday night is no longer a bar night for me.

If I was half-unconscious like everyone else, our house may have totally burned down and I may not be able to write this right now.

As much as I love her, the roommate who was found guilty didn’t even remember doing it. Her last memory was craving eggs, so we put two and two together.

This was an eye-opening experience for me, and it’s sad it took a smoke alarm for me to get it.

But, when the first question a roommate asked after our little incident was, “Was it the good pan?” It only shows that some of us think bad things won’t happen to us. But, they can.

We aren’t invincible.

Jessica Lumpp is a sophomore magazine journalism major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected].