I have arrived late at my desk today, sporting a fetching tiredness tic which is causing my right eye to twitch randomly and annoyingly in the manner of an even-creepier-than-normal Anne Robinson. I am lacking motivation, and haven’t been able to bring myself to do anything on today’s to-do list beyond the unofficial entries: “make coffee for self” and “check tomatoes on facebook farm.”
All this from a distressing altercation with a smoke alarm last night.
The thing ran out of batteries yesterday afternoon and started cheeping at regular intervals of about 23.5 seconds as I was (belatedly) reconciling my January income and expenses. Not much fun under the best of circumstances, never mind whilst having your ears periodically assaulted by a tiny electronic sadist.
For some reason my usual “do it now” ethos deserted me entirely and it didn’t occur to me to investigate or do anything about the noise before leaving the house to go for a haircut with follicular genius Neil Barton.
Of course I paid for my remissness later on, as arriving home on the wrong side of midnight and a few Tigerlily mojitos, I realised that the pesky device was still set on tormenting me, and had evilly increased its hideous cheep-to-silence ratio considerably since the afternoon.
I spent the best part of an hour perched on one of the dining room chairs, digging away at the device with a pair of (now mangled) tweezers, trying vainly and with much profanity to stop it from going off. I knew that it was trying to tell me that it was low on go-juice, but I just couldn’t understand how it would be possible to change the batteries if I couldn’t get the frickin’ cover off!
“What do you want from me??” I found myself shrieking at the ceiling in desperation.
Eventually I gave up in disgust, and tried two different bedrooms to see if I had any chance of dropping off and managing to sleep through the noise.
No joy of course; the thing about smoke alarms is that they’re deliberately built to be loud enough to be heard clearly in any part of your house – a laudable and essential design feature I’m sure, given the hazardous nature of chip pans and scented candles, as we all know – but absolutely impossible to ignore when it’s going off for no good reason and you’re trying to get some kip.
Finally I dragged myself back upstairs to poke hopelessly and stare blearily at my tormentor, and noticed a tiny sticker placed discreetly (some might suspect it was in fact hidden, although not for me such paranoia…) in between the plastic cover and the base unit – visible only when the cover was half prised off with my poor tweezers.
“WARNING – battery not replaceable, see instruction leaflet.”
Several moments of exhausted and half cut confusion followed as I tried to digest this information and figure out what it meant for my immediate and ongoing sleep requirements. Surely it wasn’t possible for the smoke alarm to be cheeping due to low batteries if the batteries couldn’t be replaced? This must mean that the system was mains powered with a battery backup, which would in turn mean that it was technically impossible for it to be cheeping due to low power.
The horrible prospect of an insoluble electronic malfunction crossed my mind briefly, before finally inspiration struck and I looked further along the ceiling to see a second, older and long- forgotten smoke alarm screwed unobtrusively a few feet to the left of the one I’d been fruitlessly hacking at for the last hour and a half.
Emitting something between a shriek of frustration and a moan of gratitude, I leaped back on to the dining room chair, flipped the lid of the second alarm and snatched out the Duracell Procell 9V battery (which I have just discovered has “MAR 2007″ stamped helpfully on the side).
Revelling blissfully in the adorable silence, I vowed solemnly never again to ignore a repetitive noise and hope it would go away.
The moral of my story is clear; if there’s something you’re putting off, do it now – or you’ll find yourself alone at midnight, half crazed with lack of sleep, and exercising your mojito-diminished problem solving skills on a small yet terrible plastic adversary.
You heard it here first, and you have been warned…
