the utility of alarms

Let me start with this. Our house has a plethora of alarms. There's a smoke alarm in each of the four bedrooms, two in the upstairs hall and two more downstairs, and one upstairs plugged into the alarm system. On top of that we have natural gas, so we have carbon monoxide alarms...one upstairs and one downstairs, and a third plugged into the alarm system. Keeping up with batteries alone is a pain in the ass, and that's where this post begins.

I went to the gym last night, got through a half hour on a stationary bike and started with the treadmill, when my cell phone rang...so I got off and answered it.

It's the wife, sounding very annoyed. The carbon monoxide alarms are going off..both upstairs and downstairs. I'm thinking...well, it's been a while...change the batteries. She is battery changing challenged, however, and wanted to know how soon I'd be done. I'm smart enough to know that I was done then, and it was time to go home.

I got home and sure enough, both of them are going off, and it's obnoxious, so I go about taking them apart and putting in new batteries and hitting reset buttons. This went on for a while, because those puppies are somehow interconnected and I had to drain the capacitors on both of them to get the reset thing to actually take, and about half an hour later we had peace and quiet again.

After all that, it hit me though. The freakin' carbon monoxide alarms went off. Nobody thought, "Oh shit, we have a carbon monoxide problem!" Nobody headed immediately outside, like it says to do on the alarm. Nobody called 911. Nobody even opened a window, and it wasn't all that cold outside. Everyone, me included, assumed there was a problem with the alarm and we needed to find out what it takes to shut the damn thing up. Kinda makes me wonder why we have the things in the first place.