Usually, it’s Willie who messes up.
Sometimes, it’s Don.
This time, it was me.
I know, I know. I’m usually perfect. I’m sorry to disappoint you guys.
My downfall began Friday. I was coaching my Parkinson’s boxers when the text flashed across my phone.
One of our smoke detectors was emitting a repetitive, shrill chirp. Not the blare a fire would cause; it was more like the sound of a dying battery. The noise was awful, my daughter said in her text. She was having difficulty concentrating on virtual school.
I arrived home to find my son and Pete just as aggravated by the incessant chirp as my daughter. My son, knowing no fire was tearing through our house, had Googled the cause of the chirp. He, too, believed it to be a dying smoke detector battery.
He had isolated the offending smoke detector. It was in our upstairs hallway, outside of my bedroom.
He dragged a chair to the smoke detector, intent on removing the battery. But he isn’t tall enough to reach it, even with a chair.
My daughter is taller, but she was in a virtual lecture. So my son grabbed a wrench. It gave him just enough yardage to reach the battery compartment.
But even with the battery out, the chirp persisted.
Pete, for his part, couldn’t figure out what to do. He wanted to be away from the chirp. But it was cold outside, and none of his people would go outside with him.
So he settled for an incessant rotation of shaking in fear on the sofa and shaking from cold outside.
I told everyone this was an easy fix. While I was proud of my son’s ingenuity, I knew the culprit was our house security alarm, not the smoke detector. The alarm’s sound system is a white box near the smoke detector outside of my bedroom. The security alarm makes a chirp-chirp-chirp sound when there’s a problem. In the past, I too had blamed that indicator alarm on the smoke detector.
But on Friday, that past experience made me confident the security alarm was the culprit.
I strode to the alarm control panel. I hit “Cancel.”
The chirp persisted.
I entered our code and hit “Cancel” again.
Still the alarm shrilled.
I called the alarm company. They walked me through a series of buttons to press on the control panel.
The alarm continued to blare.
My son, who struggles with school on a good day, had abandoned his work. He and Pete huddled on the sofa, buried under pillows and blankets to dull the noise.
The alarm company gave me a new set of commands to enter on the control panel. The alarm continued to wail. The company said everything on their end looked fine.
The only thing I could do, they said, was to disconnect the battery until they could get a technician out to me.
The battery is located in a metal box in my laundry room. I unscrewed the nail holding it closed. Dozens of wires were bolted into the panel inside the box. I located the battery and unplugged it.
The alarm continued its chirp-chirp-chirp.
I hung up with the alarm company. I knew it was the alarm. It had happened before. But just to be sure, I went through the house. Methodically, I removed every smoke detector battery.
The chirp continued, like a demented bird who doesn’t quite realize Hitchcock is dead.
I called the alarm company again. No, no, they told me. The previous representative had been wrong. Disconnecting the battery in the metal box wasn’t the solution. The battery is just a backup, in case of a power outage. My alarm system actually has a transformer, plugged into an outlet. It’s electric.
Boogie woogie woogie woogie.
Well, I could definitely feel that alarm here, there, and everywhere. I asked where the alarm was plugged in.
“In your basement,” the company told me.
Awesome. Except I don’t have a basement.
I went back to the metal box in the laundry room. Inside the door, a sticker told me the transformer was plugged in behind my oven.
My oven is inside my kitchen wall. The first time I saw it, at that open house so many years ago, I thought it was cute.
Now that I own it, I know it’s stupid.
Ovens inside walls are very difficult to replace. I know because I’ve done it about four times. They also cook unevenly. Pay no mind to the time and temperature recipes instruct you to cook meat or brownies. They’ll stay raw unless you double the time and jack up the temperature.
But don’t do that with cookies, scones, or croissants. Don’t even follow the recipe’s instructions. They’ll burn. Pop them in the oven. Set a timer for five minutes. Monitor them vigilantly. They’ll be fine one minute, charred beyond recognition the next.
And whatever you do, blame all of this on the oven. Even though everyone knows you’re a terrible cook.
Obviously, I couldn’t pull out the oven to unplug the alarm’s transformer, although I seriously considered it. But the microwave is above the oven, also in the wall. That I could pull out.
I hung up with the alarm company and went in search of my ladder.
I had to settle for my step stool. I didn’t find my ladder until the next day because I live with other people who refuse to be controlled and put the ladder in places it clearly doesn’t belong.
My step stool is not tall enough for me to gracefully remove the microwave. I stood on tiptoe and wiggled it out of the hole, the alarm still chirping, incessantly, gratingly, throughout the house.
The microwave, too, is plugged in behind the oven.
The cord snagged on a piece of plywood, providing me no slack to yank the plug from the outlet. The microwave is too heavy for me to hold with one hand. I stood on the stepstool, holding the microwave, looking at the snagged cord.
I was trapped. The cord was too short for me to put the microwave down anywhere. But if I didn’t put down the microwave, I couldn’t free up my hands to pull the cord from the outlet. I felt about as stupid as my in-wall oven. And all the while, the house alarm beep-beep-beeped around me.
I enlisted my son’s help. Together, we managed to unplug the microwave. Then, holding a flashlight between my teeth, I stood on tiptoes to see the socket behind the oven.
Three things were plugged in. One was obviously the extension cord the microwave had been plugged into. One I believed to be the oven. The last was a large, rectangular, white plug.
The alarm’s transformer.
Well, I thought it was the alarm’s transformer. I didn’t know for sure. But there was one way to tell.
I stretched my fingers as far as they would go, wending them around the gas main – yes, the gas main – to unplug the transformer.
And I did it. I unplugged the transformer. For my sanity. For my son’s sanity. For my daughter’s lecture. For Don, who was scheduled for a twenty-four hour shift the next day. For Pete.
But the alarm chirped on, an evil cricket bent on giving me a nervous breakdown instead of advice.
Clearly, this was not where the alarm was plugged in. Which means I had unplugged something else. If it was my Wi-Fi I would never survive this day. I determined to plug it back in.
It wouldn’t reach the outlet.
The plug had smaller wires coming off the sides. These wires, which had been long enough for the plug to reach the outlet for years, now had reduced in length. No matter how I tried, those small wires kept the plug from reaching the outlet.
I cursed a little. Which, as it turns out, is just what some stupid wires coming off of a stupid mystery plug need to magically become long enough to reach around the stupid gas main and plug back into that stupid outlet behind the stupid wall oven.
I mean, who puts an oven in a wall? And who puts an outlet behind it? Shouldn’t something like that just be hard-wired into the power grid? And who looks at an oven in a wall and thinks, “Oh I definitely want to spend the bulk of my life tangling with that! It’s so cute! That oven is such a good idea I’m going to put a microwave above it because let’s just double down on this absurdity!”
I might still be a little angry about this whole thing.
I called the alarm company again. I begged. Surely there was a way they could shut down the alarm from their end? Pete triggers the burglar alarm all the time and the company has been able to turn that noise off remotely. They could do the same here, right?
Wrong.
Well, I had been told I qualified for an emergency appointment. A technician could be at my home in an hour to fix the incessant noise that was sliding over my nerves like a cheese grater. Could I get the technician?
No, the alarm company said. I didn’t qualify for an emergency technician. But someone could come at eight Saturday morning to fix the alarm.
Yes. They expected us to sleep in a house with an alarm screeching every sixty seconds.
Hell no, I said. This needed to be fixed today.
I was assured a “coordinator” would call me in an hour. This coordinator would decide if the demented alarm qualified for an emergency technician.
I agreed to have the all-powerful Oz of a coordinator call me within the hour. But I’m a doer. I solve problems in parallel.
I grabbed my screwdriver and headed back to the metal box in my laundry room.
Next to the battery I had unplugged was what looked like a phone jack. I know just enough about my alarm to be dangerous. The alarm communicates with the alarm company through the phone line. Therefore, that jack inside the metal box was probably pretty integral to the system.
I yanked the cord from the alarm’s Jack In The Box.
Sorry. I couldn’t resist.
As the alarm continued to shriek around me, I unbolted each of the dozens of wires in that metal box, yanking them free from the green panel forcing them to make the alarm wail.
The alarm howled on.
If that’s the way the alarm wanted to play it, then that’s how we would play it. I took my too-short step stool and my screwdriver to the speaker, the one near the smoke detector in the upstairs hallway.
I was going to rob the alarm of its voice.
I dismantled the speaker. I unscrewed it from the wall and took it apart.
Relentlessly, the alarm continued to scream.
I had been fighting with the alarm for two hours. Two hours of letting Pete in and out of the house. Two hours of the kids cowering from the noise. Two hours of calling the alarm company.
The hour in which the demigod coordinator was supposed to call me came and went. I was on hour three.
I called the alarm company again. I demanded to know why the promised coordinator hadn’t called me. Did this coordinator not realize they held my sanity in their hands? Did they not realize I was driving the Blue Route with seven ducks and one teenager in my car, hoping for salvation?
I don’t have time to explain the ducks here. You might find my Instagram helpful.
As I tangled with the alarm company from my car, hoping to speak with the Thanos coordinator whose possession of the Infinity Stones gave them the power to send their minions to turn off my alarm, Don arrived home.
The microwave sat on the piano bench, the hole its absence left in the kitchen wall gaping above the oven. Wires hung from the wall in the upstairs hallway. Wires hung from the metal box in the laundry room. The step stool was in the upstairs hallway, as was a kitchen chair. Tools, flashlights, and water glasses littered the house.
I got thirsty. Pulling wires out of every orifice in your house is dehydrating work.
The alarm still shrilled every sixty seconds. My son and Pete continued to tremble beneath sound-dulling blankets and pillows.
I arrived home not long after Don. The alarm had been beep-beep-beeping for nearly six hours. I’d called the alarm company five times. I was not going to be happy until I made Don just as angry as I was.
I railed against the alarm company, their unwillingness to help. We agreed we were done. We’d cancel our service just as soon as they made the noise stop.
I told Don about the microwave. I told him how I had torn the wires from the alarm system.
Don, who had not been driven insane by the water torture of an alarm howling for six hours, patiently, methodically, went through the house.
I paced, the noise a Turn of the Screw, chipping away at my nerves.
And then it stopped. Blissfully stopped. It was like relief from a headache. Removing a stone from your shoe. Taking off that bra whose underwire has begun to poke out.
Don – my hero, my Jamie Fraser, my Iron Man – appeared before me. I asked what he had done. What had he done to free us from the noise?
“It wasn’t the security alarm,” Don said. “It was the carbon monoxide detector.”
You know in No Way Out, when you find out that Kevin Costner was the Russian spy all along? When you think about everything he’s done the whole movie and see it through the lens of his spycraft? When you realize everything he did wasn’t for the reasons you thought?
That was how I felt.
Everything I had done that I thought was so clever – removing batteries, dismantling wires, yanking out the microwave, even demanding to speak with a coordinator – had actually been just as stupid as my oven.
Kevin Costner blew his mission and so did I. I had failed to glean state secrets from Gene Hackman. I would never aid the USSR in taking down America.
Don grinned at me. “Well. I know THIS story won’t show up anywhere. You won’t write about this because it was you.” He kissed the tip of my nose as he set off to replace the carbon monoxide monitor’s battery.
I love it when he’s wrong.