Anyone else hear these damn things with low batteries everygoddamnedwhere?! They’re stalking me. There’s one beeping in the basement hallway at work right now. beep I almost always hear them at night. Walking down the street past a random apartment building with an empty storefront at street level. beep Waiting at a bus stop, in front of a realtor’s office. beep Walking from work to the El and passing another apartment/commercial building. beep Even just walking the neighborhood, passing a house or duplex or condo building. beep
I can’t say they’ve been stalking me, but my house is infested with them. There are 8 detectors (smoke and CO) scattered through the place, and three of them started the low-battery signals in the past week. Figuring out which ones were emitting high-pitched chirps at long intervals was lots of fun. (I couldn’t even tell how many were doing it at first, just that every time I stood under one, the sound came from somewhere else.)
I never hear them. When they go off, someone changes the battery or removes it temporarily. I just purchased a 10 year lithium battery from Lowe’s for an extra couple of bucks to satisfy the building inspector.
Living in the city has it’s own problems to begin with, but I know what you are saying. A house across the street and two over went into foreclosure and the owner moved out. A couple months later, one smoke alarm began to chirp, then two, until about four or five of them were chirping.
Sitting out on the deck having a smoke you could here the little demons chirping, as if they were talking to each other. It took around three to six months for all the batteries to finally die off, but in the meantime it was annoying listening to the chirp demons echoing at night.
And have to look forward to all of them chirping at once? Madness, I say. (Besides, most of them have fresh batteries at this point, and ought to last a good while.)
It always has to start happening at five in the motherfucking morning, too.
Look, smoke alarm, there’s two other smoke alarms within ten feet of each other. If there’s a fire in the area, I’ll get the message, trust me. Also, I’m trying to sleep and I hate you.
Reminds me of the mysterious beep we had from under the kitchen sink that beeped for months. This area had become the repository of all things that wouldn’t fit in the junk drawer and the beep would begin at exactly 5:48pm, beep for seven minutes, stop for seven minutes, then beep for seven more minutes, and so on then stop.
Why it began beeping, no one knows. Why no one looked for it, well, it was dark and dank under the sink and no cursory inspection seemed to point to it, even while it beeped. Besides, it was only a very soft beep that annoyed only the very anal attentive and as you may surmise, we were more like anal repulsives. We like living amongst all our shit.
Then one day the garbage disposal broke and we called the plumber. He requested we clear out the area under the sink. We did and from its depths was found a battered “AAA” battery travel analogue alarm clock, laying face down and set to ring at 5:30. The hour hand rattled within the clear plastic face cover and the knobby thing that controlled the alarm on and off was missing.
When the plumber was done, everything was replaced under the sink, except the clock. It sat on the counter next to the sink for an additional several months. It even survived an early morning siege, when I tried to find a “AAA” battery for my dead Walkman radio, but the back of the clock seemed to be forever glued shut.
We discovered that it actually beeped twice a day, evening and morning and now that we knew what it was that beeped, we were content to let it be. Like an odd cuckoo clock, we relied on it to signal when 6 o’clock was approaching.
Alas, it finally stopped beeping and its corpse lay resting on the counter for another couple of months until it disappeared…:o
Years ago I worked for Motorola, which meant that I had a pager. One night I was having weird dreams that I was getting paged constantly. The dreams finally woke me up at about 4 a.m. and I thought that I heard a beep. Yup, the smoke detector had been beeping for hours causing my dreams. I couldn’t figure out how to access the battery, so I just ripped the detector off of the wall. I doubt that I got much more sleep that night.
It always has to start happening at five in the motherfucking morning, too.
Not true. We rent a house each year for the overnight of a 2-day charity bike ride so that the whole group can stay together. Having learned over the years, when I got there this year, I skipped the large bedroom on the first floor (with the private bath) because it can be loud if people are staying up chatting/‘re-hydrating’/watching TV. No I opted for the smaller room upstairs where it’s usually quiet. About 12:30-1:00 Mr. Smoke Alarm decided to let us know that his battery was dying. Two of us independently got up to look for it, looking **up **in all of the common areas but couldn’t find it.
“who’s in that room?”
“I don’t know”
“can we go in to look for it?”
“better not, if it’s a female & she wakes up, it won’t look good”
So we went back to bed, sleeping about 43 seconds at a time for the rest of the night. Ended up finding it the next morning, sitting on a chair. Umm, smoke rises, by the time smoke get to the level of the chair, you’re in deep <smoke>!
The real kicker was the guy on the first floor who said repeatedly how he slept like a baby.
One day the husband in the couple living in the apartment below us had a heart attack and an ambulance came and whisked him away. A few days later we figured he had come home and was on some sort of beeping life support down there, and we listened to his machine all night, every night. Turns out he was dead, his wife was off staying with relatives, and it was the damn smoke detector. But we hadn’t sleep for a week, picturing him bristling with tubes and wires just feet below our miserable bed.
I feel obligated to say we felt bad for his deadness and all, though it doesn’t really fit the theme we all have going here…
It reminds me of the “Everything’s OK” alarm that Homer Simpson invented. It beeps loudly every three seconds unless something isn’t OK. Once you turn it on, it can’t be turned off…but it does break easily.
