Good times.
I am past the age where I want to see 2 o’clock twice a day, thankyouverymuch. I am also a person naturally wound up a bit too tight, so getting jolted out of bed by a blaring siren pretty much turns me into a cat who’s just been told it’s going to get a bath. And I stay nervous and jittery for, oh I don’t know, the rest of the year.
My family has a long history with faulty smoke detectors and middle of the night fire drills, mostly when we’re out of town. I remember my folks telling the story of how they had to evacuate their enormous Las Vegas hotel during a fire scare that involved gambling businessmen, descending fire walls, and underground escape routes. As a child, this was both thrilling and terrifying, although I quickly came down on just the side of terrifying (and I’m sure I’ve just exaggerated the heck out of that story in 1 sentence, but, hey, I was young, so sue me).
There were countless practices every year at school, some involving horrific demonstrations of explosions (not such a good thing for a jumpy 6 year old girl) and lots of yelling to go Go GO! But it trained me well, because when a fire alarm sounds in our New Orleans French Quarter (read: built of sticks and splinters back in 1890) at 3 AM, I shot straight up from my bed, bolted out the door, and flew down 5 flights of stairs on pure adrenaline. My brother, sister, and best friend were right behind me, having experienced the same sort of drills throughout their academic careers. We ended up at the swimming pool, which just so happened to be in a courtyard in the center of the hotel. Yeah, that was some masterful fire route planning right there. Turned out some brilliant, Mensa grade college kids decided to test out the smoke detectors in their rooms (I think it was cigars, but the memory’s hazy, since it was 3 IN THE MORNING), but we didn’t find that out for a bit, so we bided our time trying to figure out how quickly the flames would trap us and we’d have to jump in the pool to keep our clothes from burning. Just another relaxing family vacation. (This is not to be confused with the vacation during which I inadvertently set the van on fire, but that’s a story for another time).
And let’s not forget the motel smoke detectors that choose the nights in which my family has checked in to begin their death march. Not exactly reveille. The image of my father ripped the offending device out of the wall with his bare hands is not something I’ll ever forget (if he could be that mad at an inanimate object, I decided it was probably smart not to get on his bad side).
These experiences are not relegated to vacations or family excursions alone. There was the 4 AM wake up call in my dorm room, when, with my roommate out of town for the weekend, I scrambled into my shoes, flew out into the hall to see… nothing. No teaming gaggles of girls flooding into the stairwells, no advisors begging us to move quickly and quietly out of the building. It was my own private fire drill. I believe that before the dawn of that day, I’d had to awaken the resident director and get her to shut off the entire building’s system just to stop the blaring until maintenance would work some magic.
So, you see, I’m both accustomed to and completely freaked out by fire alarms. Sammy is as well, due to both a surprise encounter at a car wash of all places and, well, genetics. A few weeks ago, the detector started randomly honking at us. We thought it was the security system, but a quick call revealed they were as clueless as we were. It was 9 PM, so the Hub and I were still up, but we didn’t want to kids to wake up and we certainly didn’t want to go into the sleeping hours worried that the honking would continue. This particular model is hardwired to the house, and we couldn’t find any sort of battery in it anywhere, so I ended up unscrewing it, yanking wires out of the wall as best I could without electrocuting myself, and eventually getting it to stop. Or so I thought. A few days later, I cleaned the dust out of it and hooker her back up.
Which leads us to last night. The first honk was something of a dream; maybe I heard it or maybe it was all in my head. Another honk 30 seconds later confirmed the nightmare. We both jumped out a bed on a mission to silence the evildoer. I grabbed the screwdrivers and Chris grabbed the ladder and we went to work. We did everything we could (which wasn’t much at 2 AM with little knowledge of the wiring situation therein). I was ready to take a baseball bat to the thing, but Chris decided to call the fire department, who A) blessedly did not send an engine straight to our house, and B) told us they would contact someone to help us and call us right back. (The call back occurred at 6:30 AM. Nice.) We consulted our contractor, Mr. Google, and discovered that not only is the manufacturer out of business with no information to be found, but also the only answer to how to disconnect a smoke detector is don’t do that, you idiot. We ended up turning off the breaker to the hallway, which disengaged the detector, and Chris went back to bed. Me? Not so much. I had visions of the houses in our neighborhood that have burned in the middle of the night in recent years, and I knew sleep was a far off dream. I managed to clear some room on the DVR though.
The best part of the whole deal is that the kids did not wake up. Think about that for a second. That’s a miracle right there.
Hopefully, I’ll get the little bugger fixed (I mean replaced) today so I don’t have to keep mainlining caffeine tomorrow. But I’ll be keeping that baseball bat handy, just in case.
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