I barge in and I hear a loud bloop. Maybe. I ignore it, as is my wont. Then I hear another bloop. That reminds me of the week my parents left town; the smoke alarm in my room beeped in a very intermittent but steady (and loud) rhythm one morning. I tried to shut it off or reset it, but I don't know if you're supposed to do that to a smoke alarm. I had to leave for work, so Father fixed it for me. What he did to fix it, I don't know.
At first I thought it was the smoke alarm in the hallway, so I grabbed a chair and climbed out to take it out. I saw Father play around with the noisy smoke alarm in my bedroom, and I thought I had to do the same. But something wasn't right. All throughout this exercise my ears got hit with that piercing noise, but it didn't sound as if it was coming from up high. And I pressed the smoke alarm against my ear (and winced), the bleep didn't shatter my eardrum. That's when I climbed down from the chair and reassessed. Then I heard the noise coming from down below -- in the same hallway, but from the carbon monoxide alarm plugged into the socket. A red light coming on with the loud bloop confirmed that it was the one that was bleeping.
I hate those goddamn bleeps. I know, I know, they're supposed to be too loud in order to wake you up if there's a fire or a carbon monoxide leak. But they also go off if the battery runs low, and although replacing the battery is also important, trying to figure out how to replace the battery -- let alone figuring out how to open the goddamn lid -- is hard without anticipating and fearing a loud noise going off right next to your ear.
I pushed buttons. I took the alarm out of the socket, but that just made the blooping one continuous bloop because it was no longer plugged in. At a loss, I had to turn on the computer so I can look up how to turn off the damn thing ... not necessarily trying to divine what the bleeping means. And then the damndest thing happened. When I turned on my new laptop, it started making a noise, a fusillade of beeps and bleeps and bloops. What the fuck? And then it said that my computer had trouble starting up. Bullshit. When did that happen? I didn't know what else to do except run a diagnostic that I don't think was necessary. It made me answer whether I saw a spectrum of colors on the screen. What the here is this for? Did my lap just get hacked? I thought this was new. I thought this had state-of-the-art security. You know, this laptop has given me these slight, weird problems from the outset; this is the latest and scariest of them. And I don't know where this is going to go.
It took several minutes for this diagnostic to get finished, and it determined nothing else was hinky. In the middle of this surprise test for my new laptop, I just yanked the CO detector. And this time the alarm didn't go off, although it continued to bloop on occasion. I hope to Buddha there isn't a CO leak in the house, and if there is, well, it was nice knowin' ya. But it very well could be doing that because the air outdoors is pretty bad. From noon until 8 p.m. yesterday (Friday), the area was under an Air Quality Warning, where it got so bad (presumably from the wildfires out west and in western Canada) that people with sensitivities were cautioned to stay indoors. I don't know if any of the particulates in the air include carbon monoxide, but I can see the alarm going off for bad air.
Whatever the case, I got my Swiss Army Knife, unscrewed the alarm lid, and yanked out the battery. It could be fine for all I know, but fuck it, I'm just going to buy a new 9V battery tomorrow. That's another thing I have to do, inbetween going to watch soccer downtown, visiting Grandmother's best friend, exchanging a bottle for craft pop, buying Subway so I have something to put the rest of this half-tomato in, eat Subway, then rest before the game tomorrow.
Goddamn, I'm beset on all sides!
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