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Today is Wednesday. Today is the day I will end up in jail. Some people go to jail for robbery, some go to jail for murder, and some even go to jail for outstanding parking tickets. Me? No. I won’t go to jail for anything like that. If anything, I will go to jail for physically assaulting someone with a smoke detector.
Let me set the scene for you: it was Thursday, just last week. I came home from a mediocre day at my mediocre job to begin my mediocre evening of meaningless TV and grad school homework. That’s when I heard it. It was a sound as shrill as nails on a chalkboard, and just as quickly as it came, it was gone. In the beginning, I thought I was making it up. I thought my long, mediocre day in an even longer, mediocre week was just getting to me. I was tired. Yeah, that’s it. I was tired. Then I heard it again a few minutes later, right outside my door. This time it was different: a quick succession of three. It definitely existed, and it definitely existed right outside my apartment door. What was it?
A dying smoke detector.
“Oh, that’s it? That’s not a big deal,” you say. “That’s an easy fix. Just put a new battery in it,” you say. Well, Sherlocks of the world, I would love to. I would love to reach my hands up to the sky and make miracles happen, but considering I stand at a whopping 5-foot-5 and the smoke detector is 20 feet in the air, I don’t believe I can make that happen anytime soon. “Put in a maintenance request,” you say. I bet you graduated summa cum laude, didn’t you? Well, I have, genius–three to be exact, and much to my chagrin. So what am I doing in a last-ditch effort to solve the problem? Math. I’m going to write real life numbers on a piece of paper where I’ll even show my damn work, and then I’m going to nail it to the door of my leasing office like it’s Luther’s fucking 95 Theses.
So let’s do some math, guys. I’m not great at math, but I can make the calculator app on my phone work and that’s good enough for me. I hear this godforsaken, incessant beeping day and night, one to four times every 10 seconds to two minutes. Beep. I’ve heard it since approximately 7 p.m. Thursday and my leasing office opened at 9 a.m. today. Beep. That’s 134 hours. Beep. If you care to have Siri divide that into minutes for you, that’s 8,040 minutes. Beep. Let’s, for the sake of doing less math, say that I only hear one beep every 20 seconds: 3 bpm (beeps per minute). THAT’S 24,120 BEEP BEEP BEEPS!
I’m going out of my fucking mind over here. My eye is starting to twitch and if we’re being completely honest here, I’m tweaking like a crack addict experiencing withdrawal. I don’t remember life without beeps, and it just keeps getting worse. The longer it goes on, the more it beeps at me. I just can’t take it anymore. MERCY!
If it’s not fixed by the time I come home from work today, I’m either going to call the fire marshal and rat out their cheap asses or drive the five-hour roundtrip trek to my childhood home for my shotgun to, quite literally, blow it through the fucking roof. Maybe then we’ll all be thankful for something this holiday season.
Perhaps I won’t go to jail for assault today, but by God, that smoke detector is going to stop beeping..
Respond
@lnsayers
@lnsayers
20-foot ceilings, eh? Humblebrag much?
I’m picturing a Clark Griswold-esque “Fixed the newel post!” moment here.
When does the funny part of this article come?
Borrow a ladder.
No.
So either the fire marshall comes or you end it with your shotgun. You just solved your own problem.
Step up on a chair or stool and change the battery.
You know, that 15 foot high chair that we all keep in our closet.
Who the fuck has 15 foot ceilings? Do you live in a cathedral, Quasimodo?
Tiny apartment, huge ceilings. The architect must have been on drugs, but the rent is cheap so I try not to question it.
Sayers, are you posting from two different accounts?
No. You know I don’t give asshat the time of day.
Ask for help on Craigslist
No.
I hear if you do 10 math problems about it, then it falls from the ceiling and stops beeping.
You didn’t subtract the time spent at work from how many beeps you’ve heard. Assuming you spend approx 10 hours away from your home a day (at work and commute), you have been at home for 78 hours (rounded down), which is 4,680 mins, which at a rate of 3 bpm, is 14,040 beeps.
Which is still extremely fucking annoying.