It was midnight. My husband covered it with a towel, and we went to sleep. At 2 a.m., the door burst open. The Airbnb owner stormed in, furious, screaming, “You idiots, this is a…
…fire alarm!“
My husband and I sat up in bed, blinking like deer caught in headlights. The owner, a man in his late fifties with graying hair and a Hawaiian-print shirt that looked wildly out of place given the situation, stood in the doorway, panting. His eyes darted between us and the towel-covered device.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!” he continued, his voice a mix of panic and exhaustion.
I looked at my husband, who was still processing everything. “Wait, what?” I managed to say.
The owner groaned and marched over to the wall. He yanked the towel off, revealing… well, not a camera. Instead, it was a round, white fire alarm with a small blinking light.
“This is not some spy camera!” he hissed. “It’s a smoke detector! A legal requirement for rental properties! You covered it, and the system automatically alerted me to a malfunction.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. Then opened it again. “Okay, but—” I started.
“But what?” the owner snapped. “You thought I was watching you sleep? Why would I want to do that?!”
I winced. “Well, when you put it like that…”
My husband finally found his voice. “To be fair,” he said slowly, “it was blinking. And it looked suspicious.”
The owner let out a sharp laugh. “It blinks because it’s working. You know what would be suspicious? If it didn’t blink!“
That actually made sense.
A painful silence settled in the room. I could feel my face burning with embarrassment.
“Look,” I said, trying to salvage something from this disaster. “We’ve read stories about hidden cameras in Airbnbs. You can’t blame us for being cautious.”
The owner sighed and rubbed his temples. “I get it. I do. But let me ask you something—” He pointed at the ceiling. “If I wanted to secretly film you, do you think I’d do it with something so obviously placed in plain sight? Like, right in the middle of the ceiling?”
My husband and I exchanged glances.
“Well… when you put it like that,” I mumbled.
The owner threw his hands up. “Thank you!”
I cleared my throat, desperate to change the subject. “Uh, so… you said the system alerted you? Does that mean—”
“Yeah,” the owner cut in. “It means I got a call at 2 a.m. from the security system, saying there was a fire alarm failure in the property. I had to get out of bed, drive all the way here, and barge into my own Airbnb like a maniac just to stop you from—” He motioned vaguely at the ceiling. “—suffocating yourselves in your sleep.“
I blinked. “Suffocating ourselves?”
“Yes! Covering a fire alarm is dangerous! If there was an actual fire, you wouldn’t have been alerted in time!”
Another long silence.
I let out a weak chuckle. “Okay, so… uh, that was a big misunderstanding.”
The owner groaned. “Yeah. You think?”
My husband finally decided to just own it. He shrugged and gave a sheepish grin. “Hey, at least now you know your system works.”
The owner just stared at him. “That’s not— That’s not how this works.”
“Okay, fair,” my husband admitted.
I decided it was time to stop talking before we made things worse. “We’re really sorry. We just panicked.”