Last night at about 1am, our smoke detectors went off. Which set off the whole-house alarm. (Which, thankfully, is not hooked into one of those services that calls the fire station for you). I don’t even remember getting up, I was out of bed so quickly. Hubby hit his snooze button which made his radio go off, so I remember trying to turn that off. The thought of there being an actual fire didn’t even enter my mind for a good ten minutes. Partly, this is because there was no smoke or burning smell. And partly it’s because in my whole life the sound of a smoke detector has never signaled an actual fire. Every single time, it’s because of a dead/dying battery or other mechanical problem. (And why is it these things always malfunction in the middle of the night?) Our smoke detectors are all linked, so once one goes off then they all go off… and then the whole house alarm goes off. Amazingly, R~ and Zeeb slept through the alarm. Apparently it’s not uncommon for little kids to sleep through smoke alarms. When I went with R~’s class to the fire station last year, they told us to do a full scale fire drill every single time a detector goes off, even if you know it’s a false alarm. And while I know this is very good advice because it’s the best way to insure your kids will do the right thing in a true emergency, there was just no way I was getting them up at 1 o’clock in the morning to go outside in the cold, dark, rainy night to huddle under a tree wondering what creatures might be watching us from the woods. So instead we did a room by room inspection (starting with R~ and Zeeb’s room, of course) to make sure there truly was no fire and then to try to isolate which alarm was going off. (It went like this: detectors go off, house alarm goes off, we shut off alarm and then guess which dectector is the culprit. Husband pulls said detector down, fiddles with the battery. Alarm goes off again, start whole process over because clearly we didn’t find the right dectector yet.) It took about thirty minutes and probably 5 rounds of the Alarm Game to figure it out. Such fun. I sat on the couch with A~ and K~ and muttered curses at our builder who chose to install the world’s cheapest smoke detectors (this is not our first experience with the Alarm Game). Before we went to bed I made Hubby go outside and make absolutely certain that no flames or smoke were coming from any remote corner of our house. And as I fell asleep I thought how pathetic it is that our smoke detectors are basically teaching us to ignore them and if my life were a movie last night would have been the set-up for a real fire later (ending of course in tragedy because we’re all lulled into complacency). Thank goodness my life is not a movie.
But wait, the fun doesn’t end there. Today I was sitting at the table having a cup of tea and reading blogs while Zeeb played nicely in the family room when out of nowhere the power went out. Seriously. Out. of. nowhere. It wasn’t windy or storming or anything. And then? The carbon monoxide detector went off. I kid you not. Apparently the stupid thing goes off when the power goes out… gee, that’s handy. And not at all training me to ignore a CO2 emergency!
It was at that point I decided our house is definitely in revolt. Apparently it wants to be kept cleaner or something?
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