A comedy of errors, and a smoke detector

The other night, while resting comfortably in my bed and being just on the brink of sleep, I hear it. 

You know, ...

it.

That aweful chirping noise that comes from your smoke detector when the battery starts to fail. 
(aka: the MOST HIDEOUS NOISE ON THE EARTH.)

chirp..................

........then a wait of like 40 seconds, or enough for you to think it just might not happen again...............

chirp........

....louder the second time. 

Mocking you:  "Hahahahahaha," it says.  "I waited until you were on the cusp of sleep to employ my evil plot!"

........then, like 42 seconds this time, enough again to make you think it just MIGHT have been a false alarm.  I mean Really?  How in the world does it ALWAYS go out in the middle of the night?

chirp.

The covers get thrown off.  Hard enough to wake the still soundly sleeping husband, who could have blissfully gone the whole night without hearing it and waking up.  He too needed to feel the full wrath of the chirp.

That, and he is 8,000 feet tall and will gladly change the battery for me, right?

CHIRP

Ha!  Gladly is not exactly the word I would use.  But, up he gets never the less. 

It takes a full three minutes of annoyed, sleepy investigative work to determine exactly which detector the evil chirp is coming from.  (There are about five in this end of our house alone.)
and OF course,
it is the one in the living room...
with the vaulted ceilings...
just perfectly out of reach of the stepstool....
but we do catch a break with him being 8,000 feet tall in that he can reach it standing on one of our bar stools...but just barely.

I search in the battery box and find a lone 9V battery!  Score! 

John changes the battery... we start heading back to bed and .......

CHIRP!!

Fabulous. 

Must have been a used battery?  A bad battery?

This, I feel, is one of those marriage tests.  Put people in a position where they are exhausted, angry, and the only options are really unappealing... then see how they react. 

The options in my mind were as follows:

1. Remove detector from ceiling and hide it far, far away
2. Drive to some store that was open 24 hours and buy batteries
3. Find a pillow or other object to duct tape over the detector
4. Close the door, stuff a blanket underneath, and put in some earplugs

John didn't know if the detector could be removed from the ceiling and he couldn't reach it to see, so he went in the other room to try to remove one where he didn't need a stool. 

Low and behold, what does that one start to do when he starts messing with it?  .......

chirp.

Are you kidding me??????

........

Eventually, the detector was removed... wrapped in a towel... and closed into a box in the garage.  It NEVER stops chirping!!!

The second detector found it's happy place and stopped chirping on it's own accord.

And I went back to sleep... eventually.

The moral of the story, for those of you who like to have a moral...

Change the battery in your smoke detector every six months to avoid the evil chirp.
  -or-
Keep a BUNCH of 9V batteries on hand. 

You have been warned.