27 March 2011
Of Batteries and Cats
27/03/11 13:37
The sound woke me up slowly.
It was insistent but only appeared once in a while so I'd doze off between.
Finally though, after several minutes, I was awake. It wasn't a bird, it wasn't a plane, it was the smoke detector. Its battery had died and it was crying out "feed me, feed me." Smoke detectors are like babies: the middle of the night is their preferred time to complain. I mean really, have you ever known of a smoke detector to start chirping in the afternoon? Ever came back from a shopping trip and "Oh Honey, I think that's the smoke detector." No, it's always at two in the morning or some other awful hour. I briefly tried to ignore it but after a few more chirps I knew that wasn't going to work. So with a sigh I got up, padded across the bedroom, into the hallway and closed the door behind me. An IT guy is always on call.
OK it was the one attached to the ceiling in the hallway just outside out bedroom door. You know how they always say that you're supposed to replace your smoke detector batteries when you set the clocks for daylight savings? Well, somehow we'd missed this one. OK, to be perfectly honest, when we changed the clocks a couple of weeks ago we actually missed all of them but that's another story. I couldn't see the detecter in the dark so while I peered upwards in vein, I flipped the light on.
Little hint. If you are installing a smoke detector, don't put it within a foot of the light fixture. You can be sure that down the road somebody will need to change the battery in the middle of the night and frankly going from full dark to staring into a 75 watt bulb is a little hard on the old eyeballs.
So I reached up and unhooked the smoke detector from the ceiling because everyone knows how this works. . When the smoke detector starts to chirp in the middle of the night, you take it down, pull the battery, and go back to bed. No sense dealing with it when you're half asleep. But not this time. You see, there were wires coming out of the ceiling into the device. It wasn't a battery powered smoke detector, it was on line power so I couldn't take it down or turn it off.
So if it didn't use a battery, why was it chirping?
With a sigh I went out to get a ladder. I set it up in the hallway and climbed up a couple of steps. Once I got close up I looked for instructions printed on the case and there they were. In 8 point type, embossed in beige into a beige case written in a circle around the continuity light in the middle, with every other line in French. Oh come on now! I mean seriously. How could they not know that that the instructions will be needed by some bleary eyed, half asleep guy standing in a bathrobe on a wobbly step stool, squinting over the glare in the middle of the night? At times like this, clever design is not appreciated. A smoke detector should have instructions in big black letters with words of one syllable or less. I don't even want to see sentences, just single words: Battery, Off, Test and such and nothing else. Between one and four in the morning everyone's IQ drops by at least half, and so the instructions should be designed for first graders to understand.
After a bit I figured out that this unit was a wired smoke detector but it also had a battery backup in case of power failure. I finally located where the battery door was, popped it open, and removed the 9 volt cell.
This was when I realized that pulling the battery wasn't going to shut this thing up. Briefly, I considered grabbing the wire cutters and amputating the blasted thing, but I realized that would just cause more problems later. With a sigh I got down and rummaged around in the store room. Finally I came across a package of 9-volt cells. This was surprising in and of itself. We don't use 9-volt cells for anything except the smoke detectors and as I mentioned before we had completely forgotten all about changing the batteries this spring. We must have gotten them for the smoke detectors at some point in the past, just don't ask me when. If we hadn't had one in stock I had been seriously thinking of taking the battery out of the other smoke detector. It IS battery only, I know because I'm the one who installed it, and it will in fact shut up when I pull the cell.
So with a fresh battery in hand I climbed back up on the ladder, replaced the cell, and closed the access panel. Mercifully, the chirping ceased. Then I climbed down, put the ladder away, put the one remaining new 9 volt battery away, and tossed the dead cell on the bin of dead batteries to recycle. Then I caught the couple dozen dead batteries that were falling off the pile and lined them up in front of the overflowing bin. (Note to self: this week I gotta get rid of all the dead batteries we've collected over the last few years.) Finally, I put everything else away, turned off the light and returned to the bedroom.
I stumbled through the dark stubbing my toe and hitting my shin on every piece of furniture in the room. Finally back to where I started I began to climb back into bed. It was then that I discovered that both cats had decided that the warm spot I had vacated was now theirs. With some difficulty I scooted two displeased cats out of the way and only then was I able to climb into bed to try to get back to sleep. I'd gotten up at 2:00am and was back in bed by 2:30. As I said, an IT guy is always on call.
The best part though, was that Marsha slept through the whole thing.
Doug & Marsha
Pix: A cloudy early spring day
(And a new sign they decided to put up suddenly, for no particular reason.)
