How do they know?

[elora_c]

Why is that electronic devices always die in the middle of the night and then have to beep to let you know? At the pleasant hour of 3:30am, something in the house started going "be-doop" to call attention to itself. Every 2 minutes. Which finally led to a search for the culprit. Found one phone that was showing a red battery bar, so plugged

Comments

[word_geek]

Obviously, I'm in full agreement with you (and again, sorry I left my phone on). I believe an additional component of this conspiracy is that smoke alarms are deliberately designed such that it's difficult to tell what direction their dead-battery "chirp" is coming from. So you have to look all over the house, waiting for that next chirp, to attempt to triangulate it. And, of course, it's always in some corner that makes you think, "I didn't even know we had a smoke detector in here."

[shiny_bauble]

Ugh. We had a hideous example of this. At around 2am, all the sudden the chirping starts... so go find something to stand on and change the smoke detector. Not that one, try the other 4 detectors that are within about 15 feet of one another (1 in each bedroom + hall - yay regs) and there's still chirping. Go downstairs... it's quieter... wander the house for 30 minutes playing marco-polo with the chirp every 45 seconds. Find something stashed behind stuff on top of a bookcase where you couldn't see it. Read 'Carbon Monoxide Detector' on the label and think, "When did we get one of these?"

== Bash it with head until it stops beeping and fall unconscious.

[fluffiana]

The worst part was that this happened AGAIN when shiny was out of town, and I could not figure out what was beeping. Changing all the batteries did not help. I slept, fitfully, in the spare room with a pillow over my head. I felt pretty foolish in the morning when I called shiny and he correctly diagnosed the problem as the exact same thing that had tripped us up the year before.

[piratelemur]

Oh! And the "bee-doop!" wakes up the cat, who then decides it MUST be close to food-giver wake-up time, and decides to begin the morning tromp-on-the-humans-fest, regardless of what time it actually is. (It's generally around 3:30--you are correct.) Then, while laying verrrry still to discourage the cat, you hear the "bee-doop!", and realize it's a lost cause. Just get up, plug in the phone, feed the cat, and go back to bed. Because laying there will cause continued cat-tromping, and it's impossible to sleep while inevitably counting the "bee-doop"s.

[elora_c]

We were very lucky this time. I think it was just shy of our cat's "must be feeding time" trigger as she just lay there contentedly the whole time. I did briefly debate between the be-doops and the cat, but decided that 2.5 hrs of be-doops would be worse than disturbing the cat.