If We Die In a House Fire It Will Probably Be My Fault.

Daddy is a safety nut.  Not so much because he is a zealot about safety but because of the safety credits you can get with home insurance.  We have at least four smoke detectors in our house, that I know about.  And our house isn't that big.

He put all the smoke detectors in at the same time.  This is important because it means he put new batteries in them at the same time.  Which means that the batteries in all four smoke detectors tend to run out of juice, all around the same time, but not exactly.

Also, for some reason I don't really understand, he did not hang them on the ceilings (which would have made sense) but instead hid them in various little nooks or behind picture-frames on shelves like they were Easter eggs or something.

Our smoke detectors have this neat little feature: whenever their batteries are close to running out of juice the alarm goes off in small but shrill, ear-piercing little shrieks sporadically to let you know it's time to change them.  Ingenious, non? 

Non.

Because when I say sporadically, I mean sporadically.

#3 Does not apply for this is neither unique nor isolated.

Sometimes the alarm shrieks every two minutes, sometimes every thirty seconds, and sometimes in fifteen to twenty minute intervals, depending on whatever pattern is the most annoying to me at any given time.  

For example: 

-If I am trying to fall asleep it will go off every two minutes, giving me just enough time to almost lose consciousness before jolting me back into wakefulness.

-If I am on the phone it will go off every thirty seconds so that I am unable to really concentrate on the conversation because I am being distracting by my oncoming rage stroke.

-If I am trying to find where the hell my husband hid the damn thing, or which of the four is going off at that particular moment it will go off in 15-20 minute intervals, therefore wasting my time and making it incredibly difficult to locate the smoke detector using sound.

This always seems to happen when my husband is not home to tell me where it is or, better yet, take care of it himself.  And if ever I do somehow manage to find the culprit, what happens is this:  

-I can't figure out how the hell to remove the battery because there is no logical way of opening up the battery compartment on our models.

-While trying to open it, the damn thing goes off in my hand, only the noise is constant and wailing as if we are in a real fire, and then I spend about five minutes running around in a panic trying to find a way to make it shut up.  

-Then I accidentally shut it up by banging it repeatedly on the floor, which is good because it shut up (finally!) but bad because I don't know what I did to make that work which means that the next time I am in the same position I will not have learned anything from my experience and will therefore be condemned to repeat the whole damned nonsense.

Once I have finally, finally made it die....the next smoke detector goes off and the fun starts all over again.    Mind you, after dealing with a second one I make Daddy go and preemptively change the batteries on whichever ones are left.

You'd think I would learn and make Daddy teach me how to replace the batteries, or find the smoke detectors or any number of things that would make this ordeal less frustrating, but once they are done I tend to forget all about it until the next time.  Yes, I'm stupid like that.

I'm in smoke-detector-battery-hell right now.  So far it's only been the one, which has been located but is still going off sporadically.  It's been living in a kitchen drawer for about a week now.  Usually he changes the battery as soon as he knows about it but he's been pretty distracted lately and he keeps forgetting about it despite my incessant bitching.

So, I thought I'd help him out.

This morning, while he was in the shower, I carefully hid the smoke detector in his car.

I wonder how long it will take him to find it.