Our Late-Night Intruder

So here we are in Cambridge. So far, so good - we are starting to find our way around. It's a beautiful place to live, but more on that later. Last night I was happily sleeping, when Paul wakes me up. I looked at the clock - it was 2am. Not a time that anyone, anywhere should be awake.

Paul says to me "did you hear that bang?"
I shook my head, confused. I was already getting grumpy at him for waking me up.
Then he said "Do you hear that sound? Someone broke into our house. And they're in the basement, drilling or something."
I suddenly realized that I heard a sort of high-pitched whine, sort of like a drill. It was definitely some sort of machine. It was for sure coming from the basement. The townhome we live in has three levels, with the bedrooms on the top. There is a creepy-looking (but very useful) basement below where we keep our extra stuff.
Paul was convinced someone was down there - what else would account for the bang? And who with legitimate business would drilling something in our basement at 2am? I started to get afraid. After all, we did once have a teenage fugitive knock on our door in the night in California, who we proceeded to unwittingly help evade the cops. That's what you get for trying to be the Good Samaritan these days. That is another story entirely, but point being this: strange things have happed before on random nights. At any rate, I told Paul to go investigate the scary noise, as the man of the house. He started downstairs, and I decided to follow him.

As we went down through the kitchen and over to the door at the top of the stairs that lead into the basement, the sound was waaay louder. The sound was definitely coming from down there. So Paul tentatively opened up the door to the stairs, and we found our intruder.

It was the Swiffer Vac that I bought at WalMart the other day. It is a very handy item in case you were wondering, especially if you have lots of non-carpet flooring, as we do now. Anyway, one day after cleaning up I hung the thing on one of those plastic 3M hooks that you can stick to walls or wherever you want. I put the hook on the little landing at the top of the basement stairs. Apparently the Vac was too heavy and in the middle of the night its weight pulled the hook off the wall, sending the Vac tumbling down the basement stairs. In the process, the power switch somehow turned on. It is apparently powerful enough to sound really noisy in the middle of the night when everything is quiet.

So Paul looked at me, sort of like he was thinking about how I should have foreseen this whole chain of events and never hung the Vac on the wall. Lesson learned. And good thing it wasn't a real intruder. What did we think would happen? We didn't even have a baseball bat on hand to defend ourselves.