beep beep beep beep beep

They seem to have finished the backflow testing in my building. I have no idea what a backflow is or how you test it, but we got a paper curled into our door handles two days ago that said that the backflow would be tested today and it would make the alarms go off. It did. The alarms went off many, many times. It was annoying. It was loud. I covered my ears and then went into the bathroom where there is no alarm and closed myself in and then I started to lose my mind from the INFERNAL BEEPING. I'm not trying to suggest that I was tortured, because I know the legal definition of torture and this is not it, and I'm not trying to minimize torture, because it is horrifying, but what I shall say is that I begin to understand why certain noises are sometimes classified as torture devices. If that noise had never ended? And been just a little bit louder? And I had been in a confined space? I would have broken, for sure, and said whatever they wanted me to say. Stuff that is not true, if that's what they wanted to hear. (Which is the whole problem with torture, isn't it? You get what you want to hear, not the truth. Also that pesky little human rights problem.)