Smoke Detectors and Sleep

Last night, as I went to bed, I said a little prayer and asked God to wake me up by 6:00a. I do this sometimes, I don’t know – some people ask win the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes, I ask for help getting up a little earlier. Anyway, I asked and then faithfully drifted off to sleep.
I suppose, when I asked, that I imagined I might be awakened by the smell of fresh baked bread, or by a gentle rain caressing the window outside my bedroom, or perhaps by the Publisher’s Clearing House folks knocking on my door (I don’t play their game so that would truly be a miracle). But God has a sense of humor… So in the midst of a dream about waiting in line at the Post Office while being totally ignored, something I’m sure most of us have experienced, a subtle, cheerful chirp worked it’s way into the postal supervisor’s lecture on why her worker’s breaks were more important than the long line of waiting customers. …And people want government-run medicine? Eventually, the “chirp” became more insistent and finally woke me up. It was the smoke detector just outside my bedroom.
Okay, I admit it. I didn’t change the batteries in my smoke detector at the regulated schedule of the beginning of Daylight Saving Time – or is it supposed to be at the End of DST? Or both? I don’t know. Suffice it to say I didn’t do it. I’m not a big fan of “daylight saving” in the first place. The amount of daylight doesn’t really change, we just pretend it’s a different time for most of the year… but I digress.
I lay there for a couple of minutes trying to figure out if out I could out-sleep the chirp before realizing that I’d give up before it did. I glanced at the clock: 5:45a – right on time… just what I asked for. The smoke detector was cheerfully chirping to let me know I’d forgotten the Daylight Saving Time rule of changing its battery. God was probably chuckling… me, not so much.
Okay, I have a boatload of AA and AAA batteries in the laundry room. I figured I could change the battery quickly and maybe sneak 15 more minutes of dreamtime before the PCH van arrived. So I stumbled downstairs, grabbed two double-A’s and the kitchen ladder and then headed back towards the insistent chirping. Lights on – whoa, that and the ladder this early don’t mix… Once I stabilized myself I addressed the smoke detector. How do these things open? Which way does it turn? How far? I twisted and pulled hoping not to tear it out of the ceiling. After a minute or so of twisting and re-looking I opened the taunting contraption. Wonderful, There’s a sealed battery compartment inside. Great – I spent the next minute or so pulling and twisting to get the battery compartment open. This was really starting to eat into my 15 minutes of snooze time. (Why is it that “snooze” time seems to be the most rewarding sleep? Is it that we feel like we’re getting away with something? Who invented the snooze button? Did [s]he get a Nobel Prize for it?) After another minute of fumbling and I was there – so close to going back to snooze-land… Okay, God is probably laughing out loud now: a nine-volt battery. Who in the world uses 9-volt batteries any more? The whole world runs on double A’s and triple A’s! If I’m not mistaken, when I bought my hurricane-deterrent household generator last year they told me it ran on six double A batteries. (As an aside, do 3 double A batteries = 2 triple A batteries?)
At this point I was re-thinking my strategy. Surely I could get back to sleep in spite of the annoying chirp. <sigh>Probably not. I made my way back downstairs to the battery stash. Yep, you guessed it… no 9-volts. I wandered over to the kitchen to the junk drawer (we all have one, don’t we?) and rummaged through it again sensing the slippage of my snooze time. No batteries there either. What to do?
I finally hit upon an epiphany. I could pull the battery from the basement smoke detector and switch it with the upstairs screaming-me-me and thereby save a smidgeon of my snoozedom. Guess what, my basement doesn’t have a smoke detector. There is something on the ceiling that looks like a smoke detector but I think it’s a gas detector or something. I didn’t have gas at the time so I couldn’t be sure. Whatever it is it didn’t appear to have a battery so that plan was shot. I went back upstairs. Okay, my next plan was the downstairs smoke detector. I went all the way back upstairs to get the ladder, then back downstairs to pull the battery in the kitchen and then back upstairs to replace the obnoxious claxon outside my bedroom. Finally the beast was muzzled. I went back to bed and, I guess, slept through the PCH van visit.

Morals of the Story:

  1. God wants you to change your smoke detector battery.
  2. If you don’t change your smoke detector battery, the manufacturers, working with God, have configured them to announce your mistake between 2:00 and 6:00 in the morning.
  3. Might be a good idea to keep a couple of 9-volts on hand just in case.