| 4:30am: In a Nyquil-induced haze, I groggily roll over and look at the clock. What the hell just woke me up? Then I hear it again: the seemingly innocent chirp of the smoke alarm in the hallway, crying like a baby bird for its mother’s attention. I smack myself on the forehead, Homer Simpson style. My boyfriend and I had spoken just last week about replacing the batteries in the smoke alarms. How timely. (Don’t tell me that machines – even those as inane as smoke alarms – don’t have evil, conniving little minds.)
The smoke alarm CHIRPs insistently about every two minutes. (I know because I lay in bed watching the clock for seven minutes before I decide there is no way around this; I really do have to get up and deal with this thing right now.) I drag myself out of bed and go into the hallway. I glare up at the noisy offender, who is sitting comfortably on our extra-high ceiling, ten feet up. CHIRP, it says. We don’t have a stepladder. I’m five-foot-four, and my six-foot-two boyfriend is in Canada visiting relatives for the weekend. How the hell am I going to get up there? CHIRP.
I go into the computer room/office and retrieve the only folding chair we have in the house. I drag it into the hallway and stand on it. I reach my arm up. The smoke alarm is still over a foot out of reach. CHIRP. It's laughing at me.
Fine. I’ll show this thing – I go downstairs and retrieve our trusty broom. Maybe all the thing needs is to be reset. Maybe that will shut it up for the time being, and I can get my boyfriend to replace the battery when he gets back. Yes. Brilliant plan. Armed with the broom, I once again stand on the chair. I hit the reset button with the end of the broom. The smoke alarm makes a satisfyingly long, loud BEEEEP and then stops. I hold my breath. All’s quiet. I get down off the chair and place the broom against the wall. I groggily turn toward the bedroom. "CHIRP" the smoke alarm says – “haha, just kidding!”
Vowing never to buy another smoke alarm again, I make my way downstairs for the second time. Surely there’s got to be something in this house that I can pile on the chair to extend my height. Naturally the phone book comes to mind first, but I’m not sure if it would be tall enough, and besides, it’s rather glossy and slippery – I’d prefer not to end this episode by falling on my ass. So I leave the phone book in the cupboard as a last resort. CHIRP. I consider various storage boxes, but they’re all either flimsy plastic or cardboard, and I don’t think they would hold my weight. CHIRP.
I look at the chairs surrounding the dining room table and momentarily wonder if I could stack two chairs on top of each other. Yeah, right. Talk about falling on your ass. Ix-nay. CHIRP. In desperation, I stick my head into the garage – and find the holy grail: my “garden buddy.” This beauty is a medium-sized storage unit on wheels, made out of heavy-duty plastic. It’s made to carry multiple 50-pound bags of topsoil and rocks. It won’t even notice a tiny thing like me standing on it. Yes! CHIRP. As for the wheels – easily taken care of. I’ll turn it upside-down (wheels-side-up) so it’s not going anywhere, and stand on it between the wheels. Problem solved. I grab it – and a fresh battery – and head back upstairs.
The garden buddy is a little bit big, hanging precariously off the seat of the folding chair, and for a moment I am discouraged. But I discover that, if I position it just right, it balances. If I put my weight in the center, it should be steady. (Special note: these things really do make sense in the middle of the night.) CHIRP.
Heave-ho! I stand up on the chair/garden buddy contraption and reach up to that noisy little asshole of a smoke alarm. I easily open the battery compartment, take out the old battery, and slip the new one in. I close the compartment and hit the reset button. Another long whining BEEEEP and it’s done. A sigh of relief. Carefully, I climb off my makeshift tower and make my way back to bed.
CHIRP.
You have GOT to be kidding me. I glare up at the alarm in the hallway, but his warning light is shining an innocent, innocuous green. It takes me a minute to realize where the new sound is coming from. The smoke alarm in the spare bedroom is the new culprit.
At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m being filmed by Punk'd or some other kind of masochistic reality TV show. But no cameras are rolling, and it’s still just me, alone in the house with some sadistic little plastic boxes. I pass from disbelief to determination and head back downstairs. This time, when I ascend the stairs, I carry a whole box of 9-volt batteries.
Long story short, I – along with the folding chair and the garden buddy – replace the batteries of ALL the smoke alarms upstairs. One in each room. All the while, I curse the overly cautious bastard who built this damn condo and placed FOUR smoke alarms within 10 feet of each other. I mean, really. Each alarm gives a long, piercing BEEEEP when I hit the reset button. The only grim pleasure I derive from this is that maybe all this noise has awakened my neighbors, whose raucous parties and/or braying Bassett hound have kept me up in nights past. Take that, suckers.
It’s after 5:00am when I crawl back into bed, but the house is blessedly silent. Although I am tired, I also feel triumphant. Who needs a man around the house when I have my wits and a garden buddy?
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