Drupelets

I am a subscriber to the plan put forth by fire departments (and battery companies) that you should change the batteries in your smoke detectors every spring and fall when you change your clocks for Daylight Saving Time.

This is really a pretty good memory trick to make sure your batteries never go dead. For a college business class, Morgan, my spouse, had to do a report on a public service program that was also good marketing. Morgan chose the DST–battery link—it saves lives and sells batteries. The report got a good grade.

I'm not really worried about being caught out with a dead smoke alarm when the house catches fire. A smoke alarms these days won't just go dead; when the battery gets weak the alarm will start to emit a piercing chirp every few minutes as a warning. And I'm not one of those people who'll pull the alarm down and throw it in a corner when it starts chirping, then die in a fire because I was too lazy to replace the battery.

But it seems like whenever a smoke alarm's battery gets weak, the alarm picks about three in the morning to start telling me about it. So I faithfully replace the batteries twice a year, just to protect my sleep.

Except that apparently last spring I missed one.

This morning in the wee hours, I woke up and heard, Chirp! I realized foggily that I'd been hearing it for a while, at intervals. After further foggy consideration I identified it as a smoke alarm with life-support failing. There are several smoke alarms in our house, and this was far enough away I thought I could ignore it. I was eventually successful, and fell back asleep.

A little after four my alarm went off for my morning ride. But this morning was the coldest so far this fall and I chickened out; I decided to snooze on the couch for a while. No sooner had I stretched out under my old plaid blanket than: Chirp!

I tried again to ignore it, but this time I was too much awake and it was too close, so I got up to look for the little offender and rip its 9-volt Ray-O-Vac guts out.

You learn the acoustics of your home, consciously and unconsciously: the way sounds carry and echo, the distances from one part to another. Lying in bed, I'd been pretty sure that the chirps were coming from the alarm in the kitchen. Lying on the couch the impression had been even stronger. So I unsnapped the kitchen alarm, popped out its battery, laid them both on the counter until daylight should provide me the strength to deal further with them, and went back to the couch.

Chirp!

Oh, crap! It still sounded like the unit in the kitchen, so it had to be the alarm in the front hall, just a few feet away, originally intended to serve the two front bedrooms. So I got groaning to my feet, grumped out into the hall, and dismounted and disembatteried another alarm.

Now, the kitchen unit has a hush feature, so if you burn toast or boil over a pan on the stove or forget to take a pie out of the oven you can make the smoke alarm shut up for a few minutes while you ventilate the room. It works like this:

1. Something starts to smoke
2. The alarm starts shrieking insanely
3. You have a full second of blind panic
4. You press the HUSH button five or six times as hard as you can
5. The alarm stops shrieking and starts saying Chirp! once or twice a minute
6. You open the door and turn on the vent fan while your spouse painfully stifles laughter
7. After eight or ten minutes the hush feature turns off, and either the smoke alarm falls silent or begins shrieking again, at which point your spouse abandons all pretense and giggles hysterically until you threaten never to cook again.

The problem is that, when you first put a battery in the unit, the hush feature sometimes turns itself on, and the little beast chirps happily away for the next ten minutes or so. So I didn't put the kitchen unit back up; the hall unit and its suspect battery joined the group on the kitchen counter.

And I went back to the couch, where I once again made myself comfortable.

You guessed it. Chirp!

Now, there are only so many smoke alarms in our house. You may wonder at this point why I didn't just rip all of them down and remove every battery (and maybe pile them all up in the yard and make a bonfire and dance around them leaping and chanting). I thought I knew where the sound came from. It was too quiet originally to be the unit in our bedroom. It was too loud later to be in either of the front bedrooms, which are normally kept closed. So I had been certain that it was one of the two I'd already taken down.

But a couple of years ago, we'd put up a new unit in the girls' bedroom, because we normally kept their door closed so that the one in the front hall was inadequate. It was a different make, I reasoned now, so maybe it was louder than the older ones; maybe it sounded that loud even through a closed door.

So I quietly opened the girls' door, reached above it, and took down their unit. I then suffered several moments' confusion, trying to find the battery hatch on the back, only to discover this one ate its battery through the side. I popped out the battery, added two more items to the line on the kitchen counter, and lay down on the couch again.

Chirp!

What the— I thought I'd taken down the last unit in the front of the house!

Okay, maybe when we put up an alarm in the girls' room we'd also added one in the front bedroom, which we use for storage. So I got creakily up off the couch again and padded down the hall to the front room, cracked open the door, and looked up. Sure enough, there perched another of the new units, like a white limpet mine above the doorframe. I pulled it down, popped its battery with something like real competence this time, and lined it up on the counter with its fellow sleep-murdering demons.

And went back to the couch. Chirp!

At this point I began to seriously consider poltergeists. I had now taken down every single smoke alarm upstairs, except for the one in our bedroom, and I knew it wasn't the one I was hearing. It was only eight feet from our bed, for pity's sake; if it'd started chirping I'd've leapt right out the window.

The only possibility I saw left was that we'd put one up in the basement and forgotten about it. I vaguely remembered plans for that, as I'd vaguely remembered the unit in the front room. The basement stairwell opens right by our bedroom door, though, so it should have sounded louder in our room than in the living room. But where else could it be?

By now it was about a quarter to five; any chance of a nap was past. But I bloody well had to know what had been chirping at me for the last half hour.

So I went to stand in the stairwell. If a chirp came up from below, I'd be certain of the direction. (You don't go down in our basement in the dark unless you're certain. The front bedroom is storage; the basement is desperation.) I stood there, and stood there, and stood there. And stood there.

Chirp!

The sound didn't come from the basement. The sound didn't come from the basement. I was left with three unlikely possibilities: The unit in our bedroom was louder from the living room than from our bed; one of the disabled units on the kitchen counter was possessed; or I was suffering piercing auditory hallucinations.

I chose the least scary of the options, and slunk back into our bedroom to pull down the unit above the closet door. The kitchen counter was pretty well crammed by now, so I decided to lay this one on the washing machine. I closed the lid of the empty washer.

Which promptly roared into a spin cycle.

Apparently Morgan had stopped the washer just before the end of its final spin, and emptied it out without clearing the cycle. I jerked the lid back open, waited for my hand to stop shaking, and punched in the knob. With still-racing heart, I laid the fifth smoke alarm, the last one in the house, on the washer next to its battery.

I turned around and leaned on the washing machine to calm down a little more, and there it was, lying loose on the narrow counter between the dryer and the kitchen sink.

A sixth smoke alarm.

My vague recollections of our plan to put a unit in the basement were real enough. We'd bought the unit, but we'd never installed it; it had just been left lying in the utility room.

But some idiot (me, probably) had put a battery in it.

Later that morning, when Morgan asked me, with a worried look about the eyes, why all the smoke alarms we owned were spread out on counters, I did not find the explanation easy. Or brief.

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