So, last night at around 1am basically everyone in Chateau Steelypips was awoken by the piercing shriek of our smoke alarm system. This is not, I should not, a simple thing– it’s a system with multiple detectors, wired into the electrical power, with a unit in every bedroom. These were installed when we did our big renovation a few years back, even in the old bedrooms, because it was required by code. The leads to the mildly idiotic situation of having three detectors within ten feet of one another wired so that if one goes off they all go off, but whatever.

I said that these are wired into the electrical system, but they also have batteries, as a back-up. Which is sort of admirable, but the user interface for these units was apparently designed by a syphilitic chimpanzee, because the only “low battery” indicator they offer is the occasional piercing beep. OK, well, there’s also a status LED on the units that mostly glows green, but occasionally flashes red, at long and irregular intervals that may correlate with the battery level. Not clear, really, because syphilitic chimpanzees tend not to be literate, and thus didn’t provide any useful markings on the outside.

Anyway, while it was unpleasant to be awakened that way, I silenced the alarm, and said “OK, tomorrow we change all the batteries.” We got The Pip back into his bed, and settled down to try to get back to sleep…

And ten minutes later, the alarms all went off again. Shit. Push the hush button to silence the alarms, and this time I go downstairs to check on the unit near the kitchen, which is connected to all the others. Nothing useful there, either, but Charlie the pupper enjoyed getting let out of his gated-in area of the mud room in the middle of the night.

Back upstairs, calm The Pip down, shrieking alarms again. Double shit. The units in the bedrooms are literally the only things we own that take 9V batteries, so I’m fairly certain we don’t have spares, but I go down to check the battery stash, and miracle of miracles, we’ve got two. Of course, there are four units that need 9V batteries, but I figure maybe I can fix it by replacing the batteries that are lowest.

Hah. Syphilitic chimpanzees, remember. There is no clear indication of what the battery status is, other than an exceedingly irregular red flash and the occasional piercing beep. So I’m stumbling from bedroom to bedroom trying to decide if THIS light is more red more often than THAT light, and every couple of minutes the alarms keep going off. The hush button is no longer immediately working to silence them, either, and as a bonus, the unit in the hall has started playing a recorded voice saying “FIRE. FIRE. FIRE.”

Needing more batteries than I have, I start getting my shit together to go look for a 24-hour store where I might get some, but the goddamn alarms WON’T. SHUT. UP., and The Pip is seriously freaking out. (SteelyKid is only barely awake. Ah, to be an almost-teen…) So I start disconnecting the units– pulling the batteries, and unplugging them from the electrical lines. I am just barely calm enough to resist the temptation to rip the miserable things out of the ceiling, but I actually undo the plugs.

Four bedroom units unplugged, fine. Hall unit unplugged, the recorded voice stops. Still beeping coming from downstairs, so I go through the kitchen and unplug the unit there.

STILL beeping. Faint, but audible. Also, the voice. Back upstairs where all the units are silent and unpowered. And the beeping/voice is fainter. Back downstairs, where I don’t see another unit…

And that, dear reader, is how I learned that there’s ALSO a smoke detector unit in the basement, directly above the washing machine. It’s the same style as the hall unit upstairs (which I think may mean it’s also a carbon monoxide detector), so it takes not 9V batteries but AA batteries, and the ones in there are branded with the manufacturer’s name. Since I didn’t know the miserable thing was squatting down there, it didn’t get fresh batteries the LAST time we went through this nonsense (also in the small hours of the night, because the chimpanzees apparently built in a clock to only trigger the alarm at the worst possible time). I’m fairly certain those batteries haven’t been changed since the system was installed in the fall of 2017.

And, again, the only signal we get from this is the alarms randomly going off in the middle of the night. With a recorded voice saying “FIRE. FIRE. FIRE,” which is NOT HELPFUL. If you’ve gone to the trouble of putting in a goddamn voice chip, maybe a “LOW BATTERY” message would be good? Just a thought…

So, anyway, that all took an hour, then there was another good chunk of time waiting for my adrenaline levels to drop back to a point where I could even contemplate getting back to sleep, and now I’m going to be pretty much useless for the entire day today. Much of which will now be taken up with buying batteries and trying to reconnect all these stupid smoke detectors.