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Thursday, June 25, 2009

Laws of the Universe

Which law of the universe states that batteries on smoke detectors must fail in the wee small hours of the morning? At 4:40 AM last Sunday morning, I was awoken by the intermittent beeping of the smoke detector, signaling that the battery was low. This same thing happened to me in my old apartment: middle of the night smoke detector failure. As if they think that if they were to tell me a new battery was needed in the middle of the day, the appropriate amount of urgency would not be conveyed, so they have to get my attention in the middle of the night.

Does anyone remember that episode of Friends where Phoebe's smoke detector beeps at her, so she takes it down and takes the battery out, and it still beeps, unpowered? Creepy. Bret informed me that there's some sort of small internal battery that will keep it beeping for a couple minutes even when the battery is removed. Even though there's a logical answer, it's still creepy.


I thought about waking Bret to take care of the beeping smoke detector last Sunday (because me, groggy tired, pregnant and standing on a stool in the hallway struggling to get the smoke detector unhooked is just a recipe for disaster) but he was sound asleep and it seemed mean to wake him. Also, I feel like there might be much more pressing reasons for waking him once the baby is here ("um, babe? I have to feed the baby but he blew out his diaper all over his crib...can you take care of that while I feed him?") so I don't want to start tapping into Bret's pre-dawn good will reserves quite yet.

Instead, I turned on the other fan in the bedroom, put a pillow over my head, and concentrated on ignoring the beep. Good thing there wasn't actually a fire or I might've slept through it!

3 comments:

Laura said...

The downstairs smoke detector totally failed in the middle of the night for us too a couple of months back!

Thomas and Lindsey said...

Yeah, this is very annoying. We had it happen to us after returning from vacation last June!

Thomas and Lindsey said...

I don't see any belly shots ??