The March of Progress

Not everything sucks

With things going as well as they are—just kidding—it’s sometimes easy to overlook the great advances we have made as a society. Space travel. Flatscreen TVs. Opening your hotel room door with your mobile device. (If you don’t think that last one counts, just try to open a door with a Princess phone.)

But the crowning achievement of Western civilization has to be smoke detector batteries that last forever.

In the old days there was a domestic ritual called “find the beep.” Never did the low-battery alert occur in broad daylight; it was always around 2 a.m. when we would be awakened by the relentless and excruciatingly annoying wail of a failing battery. And due to the nature of the sound, we couldn’t pinpoint which of the nearly 100 detectors in our house was causing the problem.

Smoke detectors were always a good way for contractors to give you the finger when they built your house and then promptly went out of business to dodge responsibility for shitty workmanship. The little devils (the smoke detectors, not the contractors) were always placed at the highest point in a room, so God help you if you had vaulted ceilings. Which we did. Yet another finger-flipping gesture from the little devils (in this case I mean the contractors).

So it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, the smoke detector mating call is everywhere, and we go down to the garage and pull out that gigantic ladder that, when fully extended, could reach the Empire State Building observation deck.

We drag the ladder upstairs, gouging the walls as we go, and begin the Great Smoke Detector Search. The same law of perversity that prevents the alarms from going off during the day also dictates that no matter where you start your search, the first 99 detectors you check are not the ones you’re looking for. (Imagine Obi-Wan Kenobi saying that, complete with the Jedi hand gesture.)

After about an hour of dragging, gouging, and climbing, we’d reach the last detector—the most inaccessible, the one we hoped and prayed would not be the culprit—which of course it was.

In our haste to find the offending device, we forgot to check the battery drawer (which is also the rubber band drawer, the scissors drawer, and the drawer containing about 700 packets of catsup and soy sauce). After all that dragging, gouging, climbing, and detector disappointment, it turned out that we did not have the special A67-E15-007 battery we needed to put the smoke detector, and us, out of our misery.

Even Amazon doesn’t deliver at 2 a.m., so we were left with no recourse but to take down the smoke detector and smash it to bits. That took care of the low battery warning. But we didn’t realize that the contraption had a special “smashed to bits” alarm that was even more annoying.

At that point we had no choice but to pile into the Prius with the detector and drive about five miles into the country to bury the thing. In our haste, however, we forgot to bring a shovel, so we had to dig the gravelly grave using only our car keys.

The excavation damaged our keys so badly that they wouldn’t start the car. We tried to call AAA but we had no cell service. Then the phone battery died.

At least the phone battery didn’t have an alarm.