Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Princess and the Beep

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Why is it that these things always happen at 4 in the morning? Batteries have all manner of reasonable times of day to run low, causing the electronic devices in which they're installed to beep at an annoyingly regular interval. There's 2 PM, 6:30 PM...Oooo, 11:16 AM, there's a good one! Even 8 AM would have been preferrable to the 3:42 AM at which the old, much maligned phone decided to begin its incessant, quietly insistent plea for help. It woke me from a dream. If I remember correctly, which is unlikely, given my sleep-deprived state, the dream was about teaching someone hardanger. Weird.

I wandered downstairs, because it was clearly not coming from anything on the third floor. Then I went downstairs again, because it was still faint. My first thought was, "Oh NO! Media Center has completely filled the hard disk drive before we were able to install the new drive! Oh, the humanity!" But it was just the stupid phone, which, although unplugged, was not de-batteried. I ripped its dry cell guts out and left the thing lying on the floor.

It's still there.

At times like this, all poor Michael can do is tell me that I must have princess hearing to be woken from a dead sleep by a teensy beep two floors down. I think it's his generic coping mechanism for my plentiful personality quirks. =) Wife can't exist on less than 7 hours sleep a night? Must be a princess. Wife unable to tromp around strange cities without three square meals a day? Princess. Wife can hear nearly inaudible beeping? Princess hearing. You must understand, he does not bestow this designation upon me the way one would call a child a spoiled brat. It's more like I just tried on the glass slipper. ;)

After we got back to bed, I said, "We didn't change our smoke alarm batteries at the time change this year, did we? We need to DO that." Then I laid awake for about 2 hours because my body was listening for any other weird sounds. Stupid body.

Has anyone had a battery reminder beep during daylight hours? I have not, to my knowledge, ever witnessed one, with the exception of my parents' smoke alarm, which was going off when I arrived to water their plants. Since they'd been gone for a while, though, I'm sure it started at 4 AM.

JiffNotes
Zzzzzz...

6 comments:

Jean in Georgia said...

We can tell when the smoke detector batteries go off during the day when we're gone, because the dog greets us at the door with this look that says "DO SOMETHING! MAKE IT STOP!".

As for sleeping, three words: white noise machine.

Jill said...

No...it's always the middle of the night for me too.

Sue in N. Va said...

Oh most definitely the beeps start either right as you're trapsing off to bed half asleep or in the middle of the night.

When we first built this house, the power would go out all the time and always in the middle of the night... so the UPS's would start their dischordant bleeping down in the basement and wake me up. I feel for your princess ears!!

dera frances white said...

funny, funny. we were once awakened at 3am or so by a door alarm that fell off the door, triggering the motion sensor. these were put up the night after our house was broken into, and so we thought we were being robbed again. so, out of a deep sleep, terry grabbed the first thing he could find that resembled a weapon (a hammer) and goes running out to living room like a goon. it was just a dangling door chime. kids were crying. my heart was beating like a hummingbird's. nothing like early am drama.

Anonymous said...

You jinxed me. I laughed, because I knew the part about the smoke detectors to be true. Then ours went off at 3:26 am this morning.

Anonymous said...

The last time my in-laws visited, their cell phone's battery decided to start squawking in the middle of the night, and I stood in the dark for 20 minutes, trying to locate the mystery beep (it only beeped every 2 minutes) moving closer to the target until I found it in the bottom of their toiletry case on top of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom...arg! Chad calls me "bat-woman" because I hear everything!

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