Harbinger?

If the night before the first of a month is a portent of what is to come for the rest of the month, I think I’m in trouble. Last night, out of the blue, I woke to a horrible, ear-bleeding inducing siren sound. It took me a few horrified groggy minutes to figure out it was a smoke detector, and that there was no smoke anywhere to be causing it to go off. Add to this the fact that the sound of it was echoing around the apartment and I wasn’t sure if it was the smoke detector in my bedroom or the one in the living room that I was hearing.

Having eventually determined that it was in my bedroom (actually, I groggily figured I’d do that one first and get to the other one next, as I recall), I found a chair to stand on, stood on it, and realized that the ceiling was too high and the smoke detector was still out of reach. This took several more minutes… but I finally managed to pile some stuff on the chair, and balance on my tiptoes to reach the smoke detector. Then, since I’d never touched the thing before and my sleep-addled eyes couldn’t focus on the teensy-tiny writing on the buttons, I managed to turn off the alarm, then turn it back on again, off and on once more, until it was finally off. Well, that was probably because it was dangling by its wires from the ceiling now and I’d pulled the battery out of it. But then it started an intermittent piercing beeping, spaced just far enough apart to rouse a person from a deathlike slumber. Definitely no way I could sleep through that.

At this point I tried to determine if I could pull the smoke detector completely off the ceiling, but it looked like it was hard-wired in. (Granted, I didn’t have a very good line-of-sight because it was up so high and I was perched so precariously.) I determined later–talking to people at work–that I could actually have unplugged it from the electricity completely, to stop the horrendous beeping. Oh well.

So my next recourse was (logically… ?) the circuit box. I went over to it and started flipping switches, but nothing was wired to the smoke detectors, apparently. It would appear that the smoke-detectors-of-death-shrieks have a special undead current of their own that isn’t wired into the apartment’s circuit breaker. So I flipped all the circuits back on and tried to think of something else to do. At this point it was approximately 2:15 a.m.

Eventually, I decided that I should swap the offending battery with one of the (apparently working, from the silence of the other smoke detectors) working batteries elsewhere in the house–if I had to sleep through the high-decibel “chirps,” at least I’d be doing it from the opposite end of the apartment. I determined this after rifling through all my junk drawers wondering if I’d ever accidentally bought a 9 v. battery and tucked it conveniently away. No such luck.

More drama ensued–the chair setup I was using would have been too obnoxious to carry from one end of the apartment to the other. I finally settled on upending a trunk and gingerly placing my weight along the load-bearing edges of it. With the extra foot and a half that this provided me, I could actually see what I was doing to extract the new battery. Of course, the old battery didn’t want to wedge itself into the spare bedroom detector, and now I had two scream-chirping smoke detectors enlivening my apartment in the wee hours of the morning.

However, I’d by this time extracted the (presumably good) battery, so I shooed the cats out of the guest room (where they were curiously investigating what I was doing with my new nocturnal habit), closed the door behind me to muffle the beeping, and carried the savior battery back with me. I reestablished my chair setup and managed… more out of stubbornness than skill… to muscle the new battery into the detector. It promptly went off again, but this time it actually stopped shrieking when I pressed the “stop” button (now that I finally knew how to operate it). After a long, tense pause, I determined that my bedroom would be quiet once more (I was attempting to ignore the not-very-muffled beeping from the other end of the apartment), and went back to bed. Only to get up 10 minutes later to turn on the lights, herd the cats back into my room from the hallway, and shut my bedroom door in an attempt to put two closed doors between me and the ongoing guest-room smoke detector beeps.

Of course, this morning I was awakened at ~5 a.m. by–what else?–the smoke detector in my bedroom going off again. I managed to turn it off with no extreme measures, headed back to the guest room and, in better light and with a couple hours of sleep to my name, managed to shove that battery into its place. Naturally, at that point both detectors stopped beeping entirely, and now that I was too awake to go back to bed, I had a quiet house once more.

Grrr. Any thoughts on what makes a smoke detector go off when it’s been well-behaved for two years, even in the presence of blown-out candles, stovetop accidents, and so on? My guess is that it’s either dust or an insect that made it to precisely the wrong spot.

Anyway, I wanted to record my midnight misadventures, because even in the midst of them (when I was distractedly screaming, “I hate you!” at the smoke detector–I’d gotten to the end of a very frayed rope), I was somewhat incredulous that I hadn’t made the whole thing up. Then again, maybe my sleep deprivation is making me delusional?