On Smoke Alarms

Okay. They are a requirement for buying or selling a home in some states. They are supposed to keep us safe and alert us if there IS a fire in our home, with enough time to get ourselves out safely. They are usually round, and attached to an ugly hole in the ceiling, usually one for each room or area of the home. They require batteries, they have little lights that stay on at all times, and when they go off, they are REALLY LOUD. They are called Smoke Alarms.

When I was very little, we had a smoke alarm in the the 2 foot square "hallway" between bedroom and bathroom doors in my house. It was around a corner from the kitchen. And without fail, every time mom tried to bake or broil a chicken, the fire alarm went off. Loudly. Before the chicken was done cooking. And my dad would haul out the step ladder, do a lot of swearing, and pull the batteries out of the fire alarm because THERE WAS NO FIRE. There wasn't even any smoke.

When I was in high school, my mom came into my room one night. She was really worried that I somehow had a candle burning in my bedroom. I was dead asleep, and had never even considered that it would be okay to light one of the candles in my bedroom-- let alone leave it lit after I went to sleep for the night. Of course, as I WAS asleep, it took a while for the question to percolate. The conversation (in my vague memory) went like this:

shake shake
Mom, frantic: DO YOU HAVE A CANDLE BURNING??
Me: ...huh?
Mom, still frantic: DO YOU HAVE A CANDLE BURNING??
Me: ...yeah- I think there's a candle on the dresser...
Mom goes to check it, and I go back to sleep. Of course, I've never burned a candle in my bedroom, so what she found was an unlit candle.
shake shake... shake shake shake
Mom, very worried now: Honey, DO YOU HAVE A CANDLE BURNING??
Me: ...what?
Mom, getting louder, still shaking me: DO YOU HAVE A CANDLE BURNING??
Me: What candle?
Mom, full volume, agonized: DO-YOU-HAVE-A-LIT-CANDLE-BURNING-IN-YOUR-ROOM??
Me: NO!
I roll over grumbling about dumb questions and go back to sleep, mom leaves.

The next morning, I was informed that they'd found the source of the fire alarm. Fire alarm? Yeah. It was apparently going off in the background of our middle-of-the-night conversation-- and for a few minutes before and after, as well. The source? A yogurt lid had fallen out of the dishwasher rack and onto the element, where it melted into a funny shape, and let off some sort of chemical gas that could not be seen, but did set off the fire alarm quite efficiently. There was no fire.

Later, when I'd gotten married and bought a home of my own (well, a home of my husband's own), we had a wood stove. One night when he was off on a practice deployment, I'd had myself a nice fire in our old and slightly misshapen wood stove, and since the wood coals in it were still smoking when I went to bed, I left the flu open. So the smoke from the fire could continue to go out of the house via the chimney, as usual.

I woke up around 3am needing to pee, looked around, and the whole house (my bedroom was at the very back far end of the house from the wood stove) was blue with smoke-- inside. The air was chokingly thick with it. The cat and dog were still sleeping, drugged with the smoke just like I was. I crawled to a window, opened it, and took a few breaths until I could figure out what was going on. Then I panicked. THERE WAS A FIRE IN THE HOUSE SOMEWHERE!! THERE WAS A TON OF SMOKE IN HERE!! WHY DIDN'T THE SMOKE ALARM GO OFF???

Well, no. Technically, the fire was still in the wood stove. But the fast-falling cold temperatures that night had forced all the barely-warm smoke back down the chimney, and pumped it out one of the weird holes in the back of the stove, into the house, where it had been collecting and swirling for ... about five hours... undetected by the smoke/fire alarms in every room of the house, until I believe I was fairly close to being asphyxiated by it. You could barely see through all the blue-grey smokey air in the house by the time I woke up-- and I didn't wake because I smelled smoke. There was a fire, and a dangerous level of smoke in the house... and there WAS NO SMOKE ALARM. NO FIRE ALARM. NO.

This is not to say that I think an alarm that lets you know when there is a dangerous level of smoke in the house is a bad idea. On the contrary-- I think it's a great idea. I've just never owned one. Instead, I've had a chicken alarm, a plastics alarm, and a spring roll alarm. Yay. My friend, Shana, tells me it's all a racket to get us to buy 9Volt batteries (size E)... which are not good for any other purpose that we've found, besides replacing them once or twice a year in every 'smoke' alarm in every room of every house. Hey. Free Money. No advertising needed. Most people I know will do ANYTHING to stop the frantically repeated beeep beeep beeep of a smoke alarm with a low battery in it. Including spend a lot of money on a 9V battery. Hmm...

I should create a safety appliance that every household will require, and patent the energy source for it! I'd be rich in no time. It's probably even more effective than buying lottery tickets!

Last night, I got home late from an event that was supposed to include dinner. It was a fun event, but half a helping of caesar salad does not a dinner make. So I rummaged in the freezer, and pulled out some pre-cooked frozen spring rolls. I think parts of it were even organic to make me feel better about not cooking. Bake them at 450 for 15 minutes, and you have a meal with veggies, and meat. I could handle that. It was almost 11pm. I was starved. Right up until the smoke alarm started to go off. There were five minutes to go on the spring rolls, and the bubbling oil in the oven was apparently too much for the smoke alarm's delicate system. Which has withstood over five candles simultaneously burning in the same room as the smoke alarm, multiple times.

So I got to wake up all the neighbors, deposit my not-quite-cooked spring rolls on the front porch, open the whole place up for air circulation, and scare the shigt out of the cat. Luckily, the alarm was pacified after only about five minutes. At 11pm at night. People came to their doors to ask if all was well-- which I appreciate-- and so I yelled at about the same decibel level as the alarm that all was well, and I was sorry to disturb. Then I brought my cold not-quite-cooked spring rolls back into the house, closed the doors and left the windows carefully open for a bit longer, and started looking around for hidden cameras. Somebody has to be filming this stuff. It's just too ridiculous to be happening in real life.

And, as another Catachresis blogging first... I'm giving you homework.
Yes. YOU.
Please write into the comments your own experiences with the smoke/fire alarms in your lifetime. I'll bet you know of some real winners, too. And just maybe, someone will be able to give me a VALID reason for those silly little round food-alarms in our every home. Please?