At a little past 8:30 a.m. yesterday, Wednesday, Sept. 21, first hour was interrupted by an intruder alert. Fortunately this disturbance only lasted 10 minutes, a number that pales in comparison to the infamous false alarm last year that lasted for over an hour.

Let’s assume that this alarm was triggered “inadvertently,” as the administration reports. Giving our student body the benefit of the doubt and assuming they’re above abusing the alert system that was put in place to protect us, a question arises: Why is it so easy to activate by accident? It must be because we have such an honest and docile student body.

We are all so good at following directions, when one of us asks to use a classroom phone (because we students would never use our much more accessible cellphones instead, seeing as it is against school policy) we see a list of directions on the phone and we can’t help but execute them.

We’ve been raised to follow directions so well that some students just can’t get enough of the euphoric feeling of doing what they’re told and it ends up coming back to bite them.

I’m not an administrator. I don’t know what may or may not have happened yesterday morning. However, being in my fourth year of attending MHS, I’ve developed a certain skepticism regarding my adolescent peers. I’m therefore inclined to believe that there is more to this situation than an “inadvertent” dialing of six specific numbers.

I cannot emphasize how much I respect the administration and all they do to keep our school both safe and efficient. I hope that this alarm was the result of an innocent student making an honest mistake because I want to believe all of us students are equally mature (or at least mature enough to use the intruder alert system only when it’s necessary). If that is the case – if a student out there just messed up and dialed the wrong numbers – then I want to be the first to apologize if I offended him/her.

Everybody makes mistakes. However this predicament came about, I applaud the administration for dealing with it in a swift and timely matter. I have no doubt that the administration is dealing with the student(s) involved in an appropriate manner; I have faith in them. Sadly, though, it seems as though the administrators have a little too much faith in us.

I understand that in the event of an emergency, there needs to be a clear and easy way of handling it. It’s why we have fire alarms and why we only have to dial 9-1-1 to call the police when need be. We’re willing to risk the occasional butt-dial or prank phone call to 9-1-1 for the sake of safety.

But this new intruder alert system is becoming an issue.