My wife had just gone out to pick up the week’s groceries and a box of small band aids for her knee that she had scraped while gardening. Suddenly I heard a beep, followed by a pause, followed by a beep, followed by a pause, followed by a beep….....
I said, “What the heck is that?” talking to absolutely no one. I soon recognized the sound and remembered that I had to replace one of our old smoke detectors last year, when it made that same sound.
I have three smoke detectors, with one on each floor. So which one is it? At my age, I’m always up for a challenge to relieve the day to day boredom, so let the games begin!
Oh, by the way, I should mention that I'm deaf as a post in my left ear and even though I can hear okay, I have no idea which direction sounds come from. I like to call it directional hearing problems while my wife calls it selective hearing problems:-)
So, back to my latest home improvement project... Beep..., Pause..., Beep....
Like a blind man in a dark cave, I began my search by walking around the main floor, carefully listening like a seasoned hunter tracking a moose, or in my case, more likely tracking a mouse.
Beep..., Pause..., Beep....
Ah, that's it, it's on the second floor. So, I head up the stairs and find a chair to reach the smoke detector on the ceiling.
Now I’m feeling quite proud of my caveman-like hunter-gatherer skills. There’s life in this ol’ boy yet! I decided that the guilty smoke detector will be sent to the local landfill in tomorrow’s garbage pickup.
I did remember that I had to turn off the power before removing it from the ceiling, after last year’s shocking episode of lighting myself up like a Christmas tree! So I head back down two flights of stairs to the electrical panel in the basement to turn off the breaker that powers both the smoke detector, and a nearby ceiling light.
I arrive at the panel and as I study it, I see there are dozens of breaker switches which all look the same, and wouldn’t you know it, there's no markings telling me which breaker powers what. Oh yes, now I remember, I was supposed to mark all the breakers identifying what each one powers, during this same exercise last year. I make a mental note to remind myself to remember to do that.
So, I start the process of elimination by turning off every breaker, one by one, and then head back up two flights of stairs, to see if the power is safely off. Then back down again when I discover that I've turned off the wrong breaker. This took eight trips up and down the two flights of stairs!
Once I confirmed that the power was safely off, I headed back down to the basement again, to get the screwdriver I forgot to grab off the workbench. Once again, I head back up to the second floor and sit for fifteen minutes to catch my breath.
I complete my mission for the day by removing the offending noisemaker off the ceiling, then assigning it a four letter name for my wife to have etched onto my headstone after my upcoming heart attack.
As I remove the device from the ceiling, I hear beep, pause, beep....
Being a confident handyman, having watched every episode of “Tim The Tool Man Taylor’s” Home Improvement show, I reckon that the device must store some reserve power inside it so that it will still work in an emergency if the power ever goes off. This makes perfect sense to my now oxygen starved brain.
Back down to the garage I go to toss this annoying little device into a garbage bag, amongst a big pile of soggy seafood pasta that I destroyed during last night’s “cooking adventure with Kenneth”.
"Be off with you" I say!
Back up the two flights of stairs to confirm I haven’t left any bare wires hanging before I turn the power back on, and then reward myself with a cold beer for a job well done. I will visit Home Depot tomorrow to buy a replacement smoke alarm.
After switching the breaker back on, I go back into the kitchen where this whole adventure started and open the fridge and reach for a beer. What’s that I hear? Beep, pause, beep.....! What the hell? Back up the stairs I go to figure out what's going on.
As I am staring up at the now empty hole in the ceiling where the smoke detector once lived, my foot inadvertently bumped a wicker basket with a floral arrangement on top that my wife placed on the floor, directly below the now missing smoke detector. The wicker basket, vase and floral arrangement was no match for my clumsy footwork and smashed into a million bits onto the floor.
After cleaning up the mess of broken vase, spilled water and destroyed flowers, I went back down to the garage and threw it all in the garbage bag to join the old smoke alarm.
Unbelievably, I trekked back up those damn stairs once more to complete my task, and find out why I was hearing the now familiar beep, pause, beep, pause, again!
I figured out that my wife had placed the wicker basket with floral arrangement in this specific location for a reason. She wanted to hide the wall receptacle that powers a plug-in Carbon Monoxide alarm - - this makes perfect sense to me!
Now that the wicker basket and flowers are out of the way, I can clearly see a glowing red screen that lets me know that the battery needs to be replaced and just to make sure I know it needs to be replaced, it also has an alarm that goes BEEP, PAUSE, BEEP, PAUSE...!
Back down the stairs to the garage I go to retrieve my soggy smoke detector, covered in seafood pasta, flowers and broken bits of vase, so I can reinstall it – TOMORROW!
Finally having my beer, it dawns on me that DAMN IT, I forgot to mark the breaker I turned off before!
That night when my wife came home, I poured her a nice glass of wine and told her I was worried about her wounded knee and wondered what she thought about the idea of selling the house and buying a bungalow!
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This story is 100% true, except for the
parts that I just made up
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Copyright 2024 Kenneth Lane Smith
All Rights Reserved
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