No Smoke and No Fire

Well, it was a rough night around here last night. Around five-thirty in the morning, the smoke alarm started beeping every thirty seconds. Then, when we couldn’t change the batteries fast enough, it escalated to a robot voice commanding us to change the batteries immediately.

Does anyone know why the smoke alarm batteries never run out during the day? Always the middle of the night. And this might be short-sighted of me, but I kind of think that if I’m sleeping, the fire can just go ahead and kill me, rather than the alarm continuing to wake me up with pointless battery beeping.

The worst part is that after you’ve switched out the batteries for new batteries, the beeping won’t stop until you hit the test button which makes every alarm in the house go off as though there is a real fire.

And yes, I suppose, on the one hand, it’s nice to see how quickly everyone in the house can awaken and come to complain about the alarm going off, but on the other hand, we were sleeping. And I love sleeping. I’m really good at it.

Then, after the alarm had finally been silenced, the cat situated herself beneath the offending alarm in a loaf and gave us a confident nod, as though to say, Do not worry, humans. I will sit here and guard you the rest of the night. Quite sweet of her, really, but I wished she hadn’t felt the need to do so. She also loves sleeping. She’s good at it.

Of course, the good part about getting up at five is that it gave me extra time to finish reading my book, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. I really liked it. It was fun and engaging and Eleanor was quite likeable. Glen was probably my favorite character, though.

Whenever these middle-of-the-night fire alarm incidents happen, I’m reminded of that one episode of Friends. The one where Phoebe’s smoke alarm starts beeping and she can’t get it to quit no matter what. I always hope that changing the batteries will work and that that will not be our fate.

Luckily, after blaring the test alarm and waking the whole house, if not the whole neighborhood, the beeping stopped. And both the cat and I slept in this morning.