The smoke detector in my room is low on batteries and it is telling me so by beeping both loudly and incessantly. I guess this is a good thing, because I don't want to burn up and die if the building catches on fire, but I wish I could tell it that I understand what it's been saying for the last eight hours and it can stop nagging now. It is so needy, really. It is almost needy as my grandmother.
"I'm low on batteries! Getting low on batteries!"
"I know! They're coming in the morning. Take a break and let the four million other smoke detectors in this suite take care of things."
"Watch out! Really running low on batteries now! Don't forget to replace my batteries in the morning, you hear!?"
I guess it isn't really as needy as my grandmother in terms of content (low batteries vs. well... everything), but it is a lot easier to feel sorry for an nagging, helpless, old woman who can't figure out how to fill a glass with the freezer's dispensable ice cubes than it is to feel sorry for a smoke detector that kicks you out of your room with its unbearably loud and totally unnecessary chirping.
If I ever design a smoke detector, it'll eject its battery when it's getting low. There'll be a little parachute attached to the battery and it'll float down to the floor right in front of the door, so when you're about to leave for the day you'll see this white parachute on the ground and say, "What the heck is this thing?" before remembering. Either that or the detector will change colors.
I know, it's supposed to be annoying so you'll change it before you have an accident with the toaster. Believe me, I'd go out and buy a battery and change the dang thing myself, but RL was like, "No, no! Put in a work order! NOOOO!" They're probably afraid that I'd screw something up and make the fire alarm go off like it did three nights last weekend. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that the work order people won't show up until either I've already gone insane or the battery runs out completely.
(By the way, the smoke detector is so high up on the wall that I can't reach it even while standing on a table and a chair. I can almost reach it standing on my super awesome one-bunk bunk-bed, but it's too far away from that wall in terms of horizontal distance. Dang it.)
And that is why I'm camped out in the living room, where the beep is still loud but a little more tolerable, writing a blog post at 1 in the morning. Actually, I was planning to fall asleep on the couch about three hours ago, but my most annoying suitemate and her 'friends' screwed that plan up.
Actually the 'friends' story is kind of interesting so maybe I'll write that up later and put it on here too, but given my track record with blogs that is so highly unlikely. So I guess the good that came out of this whole smoke detector beep situation is that I finally wrote a post for this blog and that hasn't happened since I got this blog in September.
(It is not really worth it, trust me.)
