>
 |
| Who tests this once a week? |
Out of a dead sleep, I jumped out of my bed at 2:00 this morning. The smoke detector was blaring. Was my first instinct to grab my precious iPhone and run outside? No.
It was to make that God awful noise stop.
Being that I live in a tiny house, the kitchen is less than 20 feet from my bedroom….which is where the smoke detector decided to prank me. The one in the hallway, midway between the two rooms clung silently to the ceiling watching me lose my shit.
What do I do when the smoke detector goes off? Exactly what you do…I grab a potholder or towel and fan the damn thing.
Because my detector goes off when a crumb at the bottom of the oven gets singed, I keep my potholder in the drawer closest to the blasted thing.
Adrenaline coursing through my veins, I finally realize that I should probably look to see if anything in the house was aflame. I couldn’t smell smoke or even anything that seemed remotely like hot plastic. Again, my house is small, so unless the roof was on fire, after looking around for 15 seconds I was fairly certain the gadget was just on the fritz.
Of course, the remainder of my Monday morning was spent with the subconscious fear that the thing would go off again and thusly I would have to leap from my slumber into action. Or worse, it would go off while I was at work and the neighbors would come swarming to see what was all the fuss. Hello, embarrassment!
By the way, you adrenaline junkies are just fucking weird. I was not pleased by that sensation at all and really do not want to experience anything else like it ever.
So, in an effort to prevent said chaos again tonight, I searched the Internet for what might have gone awry with this thing. Apparently, smoke detectors can get dusty or cobweb infested and just lose their shit sometimes.
Off to Target I went for supplies. Since I wasn’t about to drag my vacuum out to alleviate the problem, especially if the thing started blaring again when the bars closed, I bought some compressed air…or a “dust remover” as the can tells us all.
By the way, I was carded when I went to buy this shit. Are you kidding me with this? Anyone dumb enough to get high off this stuff should just go ahead and do so. We really don’t want your genes in our pool, thanks.
Oh…and why do I hate 9 volt batteries? Getting those suckers in and out of any electronics is a nightmare. I mean really. Can’t we upgrade the technology so they are easier to install? I can fit a computer in the palm of my hand, but I still have to jimmy the damn contacts into their sockets for these things to finally fit…after much cursing and swearing of course.