I could hear the shower going as I woke this morning, and realized I still had an hour to sleep so I promptly rolled over to snuggle back into the covers. Just as I was about to drift back off to dreamland I heard it. Loud. Shrill. Annoying. BEEEP! Immediately followed by a voice saying “Low battery.”
What the…?! Somewhere deep down I must have known it was the smoke detector and refused to get out of bed, but the half-awake part of my brain pondered if it could be something else. That thought was followed by “Can a smoke detector really talk?”
Apparently that mystery wasn’t interesting enough to keep me up, because I started nodding off again. Until… “BEEEP! Low battery!” I’m pretty sure that’s when I buried my head in the pillows. A few minutes later the shower stopped and I mumbled at the hubs that the smoke detector was beeping. He went to investigate, but it didn’t make a single noise for him. Typical, dysfunctional mechanical things always know when the man is listening for them to resonate their problem and therefore don’t!
I went back to sleep and the invisible lady in the detector kept quiet until after the hubs left for work and I had gotten up to get ready. Just as I’m crawling out of bed, she returned. “BEEEP! Low battery!” I’m pretty sure I flinched at the sound as I headed into the bathroom and turned on the shower to drown her out. Once out of the shower, there was a solitary “BEEEP” every minute. Apparently, there was some sort of cycle the warning ran on. How wonderfully annoying.
Tequila was so upset that she came into the bathroom and hid in the water closet a “please make it stop” look. A bit later Stoli joined her, looking confused every time it beeped. Even the cat came in to complain at one point. Like any good mommy would, I talked them through it, telling them it was ok, but that I wasn’t about to climb a ladder at 6 am to fiddle with the darn thing. Finally, it stopped and we all continued our morning routine in wonderful silence.
Then just as I was picking out shoes to go with my outfit…. “BEEEP! Low battery!” Jimminey Crickets! I texted the hubs to tell him about the situation and he promised to check it when he got home tonight. Luckily, it didn’t go off again before I left, although I probably rushed a bit at that point, so I was able to get all the kiddos out of the bedroom and close necessary doors before they had a chance to hide from the noise again.
Now don’t get me wrong, I know full well the importance of these devices, but how do they always seem to need batteries in the middle of the night? I’m positive the batteries don’t go in at that time, so maybe the manufacturers need to add another 8 hours to the battery life so it warns us in the afternoon! And perhaps our builder should have warned us that our smoke detector talks, but then again, perhaps he didn’t know there was a tiny little woman with a voice 100times her imaginary size in the detector when it was installed. And at that rate, why is the battery dying just shy of us being in the house for three months? That must have been some clearance rate refurbished battery!
Clearly, my sleep pattern was disturbed and my patience is limited today. Thankfully by the time I got home my husband had evicted this invisible female fiend. If he hadn’t, I might have found the need to re-enact the recent “Duck Dynasty” episode where they had the same situation and determined that smashing the detector to pieces was the best solution. After the 10th “BEEEP! Low battery!” in the middle of the night, that solution seems perfectly reasonable. 🙂
Dust Bunnies and Dog Toys 