There's a bit in one of the episodes in Friends where Phoebe has a run-in with a smoke detector. It's hilarious because many have had such a run-in, not to the ridiculous extreme as was depicted in the television show, of course. But, yes...I believe we all have had a story to tell.
Looks like our family has another one.
What I don't understand is, why do the batteries in a smoke detector decide to die in the middle of the night, specifically, 4am? Is there a timer in the darn things that makes them go off at the worst possible times?
Truth be told, it was my fault that we allowed the "change the batteries in your smoke detector when you change your clocks for daylight savings time" to be ignored. Yes, we did. In our last house, we failed to swap our the batteries for the past couple of years. I think that attitude carried over to our new place. The house has been completed for two years so the batteries in the smoke detectors were two years old.
At 4am they went off. I must say, they are effective--woke us all up. Then, it was a scramble to get them to stop, then get them to stop again when they started up again a few minutes after. I didn't even know what type of batteries they took. The first one we opened took AAs. We thought they all took AAs, so we checked the junk/battery drawer and found six AA batteries.
Great. We have ten detectors.
My wife was about to jump in the van and go to the gas station to pay exorbitant prices for batteries to get the blasted thing to stop alarming. I caught her just in time when I cracked open another detector and found it took 9volt batteries. Luckily, we had lots of those.
After an hour and a half (and bringing in the tall ladder...), we had all the batteries replaced and we all went to bed praying they things wouldn't go off again.
But, why 4am?
I guess it's to drive home just how important it is to change those batteries.
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