I Set Off The Fire Alarm

You might be wondering why exactly did I set the fire alarm off and I assure you that I did not do it intentionally.

On a beautiful sunny day in California, I decided to wash and blow-dry my hair. Being a black woman with unprocessed hair, this takes a while but on this particular day, I wanted to try something new. I had seen a tutorial about achieving great curls with a diffuser so I bought one and decided to give it a go.

Hair washed, music on, blow-dryer going and products everywhere, it’s safe to say that my room was very noisy.

Over the big raucous happening in my domain I heard the sound of sirens, so I went to look out the window to see what the commotion was about. Everyone was outside and I thought nothing of it because I didn’t hear an alarm go off, so I went back to diffusing my hair.

A few moments later there’s a loud banging on my door since I was standing beside the front door I answered immediately. I was staring in the faces of two firefighters who informed me that I was the culprit who set off the fire alarm!

We went over the checklist of what I was doing in the room and in the back of my mind, I knew exactly what had happened so to make their day easier I told them that the cause was my hair!

My hair set the fire alarm off!

This was not the first time that my hair had done something like that but this was the first time that I had firefighters banging on my door to see if my room was on fire from me smoking illegally inside the building.

Rabi80 said he has never heard a fire alarm go off before except the once that he blogged about in the post ‘What Would You Do If?!’ and while reading his blog post I started laughing at all the times that I had set one off by doing my hair.

I have finally come to the conclusion that even if I open the window in a hotel or any building that I’m doing my hair in, that fire detector was not built to handle a black woman applying heat to her hair. Our hair smokes when it’s being dried and the fire alarm cannot tell the difference between hair and an actual fire!

Now I occasionally applying heat to my hair, it’s best if I just air dry to avoid damage but that will never change the fact that I will indeed set off a lot more alarms in the future just by doing my hair.

Has this every happen to you?