I didn’t babysit a ton growing up.

That’s in part because I’m a boy and boys didn’t get hired as babysitters all that often.

Although I had a male babysitter once and that went well, he said sarcastically.

Your Daily Lex When I was growing up, my parents would go out most Saturday nights.

That was the thing.

They’d go out with adult friends and leave the kids home.

For a while we would have a sitter, then my older sisters were the sitter, and then they wanted to do other stuff.

There was a time when they wanted to do other stuff and I was comfortable being left alone.

I recall at some point my parents hired a sitter.

It was a guy who I didn’t know, a friend of one of my siblings.

We’re home doing our thing, whatever it was, and the doorbell rings, which was unusual and unexpected.

The babysitter is going to go to answer the door.

I’m like, well, we have to turn off the burglar alarm to do that because the alarm was always on when we were home alone with the babysitter.

When he’s going to open the door, I’m like, by the way, here’s how you use the panic button.

I show him the little panic button that was in the house.

It was two little red buttons that you have to push in unison to trigger the police to come.

He’s like, okay.

So clearly I now note the babysitter himself is also nervous about this late night doorbell ring.

This is all happening late night.

It’s not late, but we’re home alone and he wasn’t expecting the doorbell to ring and neither was I.

It’s well pre-ring doorbells since we’re all old here.

He’s a little bit concerned.

He’s like, I’m going to cut my hand over the panic button.

I’m like, okay, fine.

He opens the door.

It’s the rabbi.

The rabbi is going to the same, I guess, Hanukkah party that my parents were already at and he wanted directions to their house.

That’s already dumb because I don’t have any idea how to tell him where their house is.

But I mean, I knew the general direction, but I didn’t know the directions.

You get it.

So the babysitter, as he opens the door, leans against the panic button and sets it off.

So now there is an extremely deafening alarm going off because it’s not the silent panic alarm, which also exists.

It’s the noisy, terrifying, very loud panic button.

And so now I can’t give the rabbi the information he wants and the police are going to come, which they do.

And the rabbi goes out with his hands up.

And I remember my mom commenting later that night, like, what a great way if you’re going to burglarize a house, what a great way to interact with the police, like dress as a rabbi.

And then they’ll assume when you come out with your hands up that you’re like an innocent person and not involved in the commission of any crime.

So free tip to any aspiring burglars out there from my mom.

But so, you know, he has to go out.

The police and I eventually figured out how to get the alarm off.

And I think the rabbi even got to the Hanukkah party.

So nothing, nothing was destroyed other than my faith in that babysitter.

But there was, you know, at some point soon thereafter, I aged out of needing the sitter to be there at the house with me.

And there was a time when my parents were out every once in a while, because it wasn’t a state of the art alarm.

Maybe it was a state of the art alarm system, but the state of the art wasn’t that great in the late eighties, early nineties.

But so for whatever reason, sometimes in the middle of the night, the alarm would go off and my parents would tromp through the house, you know, whatever it was, midnight, two in the morning, whatever.

And they would make sure that it was all safe and secure.

I don’t know.

I don’t think they carried a bat or a knife or anything, but who knows?

They would go through the house and look around and make sure nothing was wrong.

And then they would leave the alarm going off the entire time until they were sure that it was safe at the house.

And then they would turn it off and set the alarm again.

And we’d go back to sleep.

It was like, I don’t know, a bird running into a window.

Who knows?

You know how birds love to run.

And so that’s why there’s the famous Bruce Springsteen song, Bruce, a bird on the run.

I almost got that joke right.

So anyway, there’s a time I’m home alone.

I’m watching like Wheel of Fortune and the alarm goes off.

And again, I’m not expecting anyone.

There shouldn’t be an alarm going off.

And I have this sequence of thoughts where I’m like, Hmm, I guess normally now my parents would be going through the house to investigate and make sure that nothing was broken into.

And then they would see that nothing is and they would turn off the alarm.

I’m not comfortable going through the house.

That’s scary.

But I’ll just wait the same amount of minutes and then turn off the alarm and then go about my evening.

And then as I’m thinking about that very sane and logical plan, I start to realize, boy, that doesn’t make any sense at all.

So I decide I should leave.

And I go out the house and I run across the street to the Zishes and I ring the doorbell, but they’re also out.

You know, it’s a hip block, I guess.

So I go a couple of houses down to the Smalls, a family who we know, but we’re not friendly with or we’re not enemies with.

We’re acquaintances.

And I ring the bell and Mrs.

Small lets me in and I explain the situation.

She’s like, Oh, I’m going to call the police and they’ll go check out your house, but you can just stand and watch TV.

And I’m like, okay, thank you.

And I’ve run there bare feet because when I realized I should get out of the house, I just like bolted out.

So I got, you know, whatever.

So there I am.

And I put on Wheel of Fortune to pick up the narrative.

There was no DVR at the time.

So I knew anything I didn’t watch, I wouldn’t see.

I was like, man, I wish they would invent a digital video recorder, but they hadn’t yet.

So, uh, Mrs.

Small comes in.

She’s like, Wheel of Fortune.

I hate that show.

And I was like, lady, what’s your problem?

I didn’t say that.

I thought like, I’ve just escaped an incredible trauma.

There’s murderers tromping through my house right now.

And I wisely and safely escaped on my own two feet and came here and you said I could watch TV and now you’re going to judge.

Anyway, that was that.

There was nothing in the house.

It was just the alarm going off again.

Um, yeah, I survived.

There were no murderers or if there were, they weren’t caught.

Uh, anyway, happy Wednesday.

Thanks for watching.