The landlords, after three years of prodding, finally agreed to do some work on the house. We got a host of improvements – new windows, they fixed the garage door and roof, replaced the house’s doors, fixed a number of things in the bathroom including the floor, and more. They also installed a smoke C02 emission detector. Almost every room now has a smoke detector in it and it’s a centralized system so that if one detector gets a whiff of smoke, they all start beeping. And this is no petite beeping either, this is make your ear hurt beeping, this is make the dog howl beeping, this is beeping that your deaf grandmother would hold her ears to hide from beeping. How do I know this?…….

…because tonight I decided I would broil a piece of pork tenderloin that had been covered in a chioptle dry rub all day. And you know what that chipotle dry rub did? It smoked. Not so much that I could detect it, but enough to cause the smoke alarm system to go off.

When the chaps who installed the thing were finished, they left some documentation for the system on our cutting board. I came home, found it, decided I had no use for it after looking at it for 2 seconds, and recycled it. Tonight I really wished I hadn’t done that, because I could not for the life of me figure out how to make the system shut the fuck up! After fiddling with several of the units and discovering I could not tolerate being close to one of them for more than about 5 seconds, I tried airing out the house by opening the front door and swinging it open and shut, but the beeping caused both my neighbors dogs to go nuts, and then they neighbors started to investigate the dogs, and I felt like such an ass standing in the door with this heinous beeping from hell coming out that I shut the door and hid. And so finally, having exhauasted every option I could think of, and growing frantic with this endless multi-toned beeping, I ran into the basement, popped the fusebox, and rebooted my entire house. Which worked….

…For about 2 minutes. And then the thing came back on. I gave up and hid in a room in the basement that had no beeping unit, reading a magazine and hoping it would shut off, which it finally did after about 10 minutes.

Sometimes I feel like the world has it in for me. But in the end it all makes me laugh at the absurdity of life I guess, now I am smiling at this story, but damn was I mad about 3 hours ago.