What to do when the smoke alarm goes off.....

Yesterday began somewhat unusually, in that I was awoken to the chirp of the smoke alarm. Given my aversion to fire, and by aversion I mean complete paralytic fear of (hint: dutch oven incident), I jumped out of bed thinking only of how quickly I could hurl myself out my bedroom window and away from the flames. When I finally realized that the chirp was just a chirp, and that the alarm was not in fact going off, I got back into bed. But the excitement had done its damage, and there was no more sleep in me.

The trick now was to determine which of my 4 smoke alarms needed a new battery. Judging how loud the next chirp was (by this time I was getting ready for work), I deduced it had to be one of the two upstairs alarms. I guessed it was the older of the two, and took the battery out. When I heard another chirp a few minutes later, I was annoyed that I had guessed wrong. While I had been able to precariously balance myself in the stairwell to reach the first one, reaching the second one would require me to go downstairs and fetch some sort of stool. But then I glanced down at the carbon monoxide detector (looks just like a smoke alarm but hangs on the bottom of the wall as opposed to the top) and figured it could just as easily be the culprit.

I knelt down and put my face close enough to read the little display screen, which usually reads 0. Just as my face was near pressed against it, the detector took its next reading and the resulting chirp nearly deafened me. L6 was what it said. Level 6? Was this an unhealthy level? Should I be holding my breath? Evacuating? "Don't move! Let's bolt! Don't breathe!" Upon even closer inspection, I read, in the tiniest print you can imagine, that LB indicates a low battery. So...may not have been so much of a 6 as it was a B. Could happen to anyone.

I put in new batteries, and as soon as I had the last one in, the display read 888 and the alarm was chirping. I had no idea what was going on. Maybe just some sort of getting-back-to-normal routine? I waited for the next reading: 249. 249? Holy crap! The alarm chirped again, and I began to fear that carbon monoxide was indeed building up inside my house despite the false positive LB reading. Luckily, the next reading, and all others since then, have come in at 0. So balance and sanity have been restored....that is, if they were ever there in the first place. Arguable.