It's story time:

JJ and I came home this Saturday morning (gone 8am till around noon) from helping to do a test run for our hosting a site for the ACM Mid-Atl Regional Programming Contest to find this note taped to our door. Arsalan was gone for the weekend, I had taken my laptop with me, and JJ's audio was turned off. Obviously it wasn't us who had been playing the music. But, we decided to not let them know it wasn't us until we had checked with Arsalan just in case; might as well be sure. Forward to the next morning, Sunday.

I was up early to do work, and about 9am this Persian music began to come from Arsalan's room. Starting quiet and quickly becoming louder and louder. His alarm clock :). Well, we knew what sound our neighbors had heard. But, Arsalan's door was locked. Not wanting the police to visit us (Though Apt 22 had played louder music at 2am before. We figured the police would be ok with music at 9am :).), I shut the circuit breaker for Arsalan's room. Problem solved. Execpt, while we have two circuit breakers labeled "bedroom," one controls both bedrooms. (We still don't know what the second does.) Needing power for internet access, we turned the breaker back on. Alarm goes off again. We switch the breaker off again, hoping his alarms' battery backup has a short lifetime. Ten minutes later, we had power, no alarm, and no police :).

Oh yes, the lighter reference: A few weeks back we had borrowed a lighter for Arsalan's fake-birthday cake. Seems we hadn't returned it :). A great way to make friends with our neighbors?
In the end I think JJ gave them a pack of lighters and apologized for our apartment's early Persian music.

(While this happened on the date recorded, I took this picture 2004:01:28 in the snow outside.)