Saturday, May 22, 2010

Beep.

On Thursday morning, I woke up to the sound of chirping. I'm not quite sure why it's called chirping when it's the most annoyingly loud beeping sound ever. Chirping implies a sweet bird. The stupid smoke alarm is not a bird. It's a piece of plastic (with a hand carbon monoxide alarm as an added bonus) that wants to pick a freaking fight.

When I woke up, I was actually a little pleased that the smoke alarm made me get out of bed (I have a tendency to not want to get out of my bed in the morning). I've been feeling rather thankful as of late and I decided to look at the positive in this beeping situation. How hard is it to change a battery, right?

I stumbled my way downstairs, hauled the step ladder upstairs, and climbed up. Nothing. No place where a battery magically pops out. What I did see was a lot of wires. Wires of every color of the rainbow. Okay, okay...maybe not every color of the rainbow, but one of them was red (which technically isn't even a color of the rainbow...kind of like how tree trunks aren't really brown...dang, our elementary school teachers were liars...LIARS!!!).

I decided to just deal with it after I got home from work. When I had gotten to work, everyone insisted that there had to be a battery in there. Around 11, I took a long lunch and came home to try to figure it out (the idea of coming home after a long day to that beeping was a horrible thought). I saw what people were talking about when they said that there was a battery. There was...except when I changed it, the thing still chirped every 30 seconds. I tried to just pull the whole thing out of the ceiling, but apparently that ticked off the chirping, talking smoke alarm. When I pulled the alarm, it set off all of the other alarms and said, "Fire! Fire!" over and over again.

At that point, I realized that I had a bigger problem on my hands. And what do you do when you have an electrical problem on your hands? You call for reinforcements. The only reinforcement I could think of was Brian's dad. So I made the phone call to Lulu to see when he was going to be home (which ended up being the next day). While I was talking to her, the frustration from the shrill beeping and the lack of sleep got to me and I started crying like a fool. Per the usual, Lulu was super sweet and reassured me that not even boys today know how to do wiring, so I shouldn't feel bad that I couldn't figure it out.

When I finally made it back to work (after an adventure at Home Depot to find the correct replacement), I got an email from Mike to ask if he could help me fix the alarm. He came within moments of me getting home from work and fixed it in about 10 minutes.

So, there you have it. Another reason I heart Mike. He has saved me from myself once again.