For Your Safety

A smoke detector is a marvelous invention that everyone knows saves lives.  It is a compact, incredibly effective piece of technology that should be in every household.  Most importantly, lest I forget to mention it, the smoke detector is also evil incarnate.

Somehow, manufacturers of the smoke detector have discovered a way to ensure that the batteries in their products never die during the daytime.  A battery will cling to the last of its charge in these tiny, plastic, life-support systems while there is a sun in the sky, and only in the absolute darkness of night will they at last decide to release their hold on this earth.

And they do not die quietly, unnoticed.  Oh, no.  As anybody who has ever owned a smoke detector will attest, when the battery dies, a smoke detector will begin emitting a noise that sounds like the cry of a baby bird oddly distorted by the howling moan of a damned soul in hell.

Last night, at two o’clock in the morning, I was awakened from a deep restful slumber.  My eyes opened, and I realized that my heart was racing, but I had no idea what had startled me awake.  I listened intently in the current silence, waiting for the footfall of a burglar in my room, or a cry for help from the street outside.  But as I lay there in my bed, time passed, and I heard absolutely nothing.  Finally, convinced that I had perhaps been forced awake by a bad dream, I closed my eyes and prepared to fall back asleep.

Chirp!

My eyes snapped open once again, and I knew – I knew – what that noise was and what horrible events it portended.  At first, I tried to ignore it, thinking I could sleep through its intermittent screams and deal with it in the morning, but thirty seconds later … Chirp!  The noise pierced my ears like a sonic icepick.

The alerts are spaced a half minute apart.  Manufacturers have determined this to be the optimal pacing based on years of research conducted by Chinese water torturers.  The time is long enough to let you convince yourself that maybe the bleat you just heard was actually the last one.  Silence stretches, building your hopes that the problem has miraculously fixed itself.  You begin to relax, relief begins to set in, then … Chirp!  Madness is the only guaranteed outcome.

I crawled out of bed, realizing that the only hope of rescuing a few more hours of sleep was to silence the intermittent distress call.  Unfortunately, another side effect of the thirty second delay between alarms is the difficulty it creates in identifying exactly which smoke detector is the true culprit.  I stood in the hallway, lost and waiting for the noise that would guide me to my destination.  At last it called out to me.  I moved forward toward where I thought I had heard it.  When I stood in the kitchen, I paused again.  Thirty seconds crawled by.

Chirp!

Shit.  It was behind me now.  I had gone right past it.  I returned to the middle of the hallway and waited again.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.

Chirp!

I was close this time.  I realized it was in one of two bedrooms.  I poked my head into my daughter’s room and listened.  As I felt myself growing noticeably older, I finally received audible confirmation that I had found the bastard responsible for waking me up.  I went to the garage, retrieved the ladder and a nine-volt battery (because everyone knows that when you are barefoot and half-asleep, the safest place to be is on top of a ladder).

I climbed the ladder without any major incidents, removed the dying battery from the smoke detector and pulled the new battery from my shirt pocket.  Looking back at the detector, I realized that there were no marked positive and negative contacts in the battery compartment and I had completely failed to note the orientation of the original battery in the space.  Swearing, I stuffed the new battery inside, figuring I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.  I climbed off the ladder and waited in the silence.

Nothing.

Celebrating that I had gotten the battery in correctly the first time, I folded up the ladder and carried it down the hallway to replace it in the garage.

Chirp!

This, in a nutshell, is why I don’t like to gamble.  With my luck, let’s just say I hope my life is never dependent on a coin toss.  I took the ladder back into the bedroom and managed to get the battery situated correctly.  The whole procedure from first awakening to crawling back into bed took only fifteen minutes, but at 2 AM it felt like a lifetime had passed.  A miserable, sleep-deprived lifetime.  As I drifted off to sleep again, my wife suggested that when one battery dies, the rest are not far behind, so I should probably replace all the smoke detector batteries.

I don’t remember exactly what I said next, but I do remember waking up the next morning on the couch.