my morning wake-up call

I find it tough enough to get up most mornings and drag myself into the workplace. The warmth of the bed, the fact that the sun isn't up yet, and a real desire to sleep well into the morning all add to my usual displeasure with jobs and employment in general. With this being the case, the very least I ask for is a peaceful entrance into the day. This is why I set the alarm to 'radio' rather than the 'beep' function.

Personally, when I awake to the sound of loud screeching beeps, I tend to think that I've been woken up by an air raid siren, sounding, of course, to alert me to an onslaught of war planes ready to bomb me into oblivion. This hate of beeping alarms was only solidified upon having a roommate that insisted on setting his alarm to beep...and kept it at very high decibels. Often, however, he would wake early and leave...forgetting to turn off the damn alarm. It would go off at an ungodly hour, and after several minutes being left unattended, I would be forced to go into his room and shut the stupid thing off myself. After the first time, the 'shutting off' process consisted of yanking it, by the cord, clean out of the wall.

Yesterday morning, not happy about being awake, I took a nice hot shower. I finished and opened the bathroom door to let the cooler air clear out some of the lingering steam. Shortly after opening the door, I'm greeted with the delightful sound of my smoke detector going off, blaring away on the wall. Naturally, this threw my morning into a tailspin and woke me up much faster than normally would have happened. I quickly scanned my memory as to what might be blazing away within the apartment. The iron hadn't been left on, no candles left burning, the stove was off...nothing came to mind.

I peeked out of the bathroom and saw, to my delight, that nothing was afire. But the damn thing was still making quite the racket. Precariously balancing atop a box, I reached the smoke detector and pressed that little button which is supposed to turn it off. It didn't work. So I pulled it off my wall...which really didn't do anything, except that it was now shrieking in my hands. Being as mechanically inclined as I am, I started shaking the thing. Mysteriously, this caused it to shut off. I placed it back upon the wall and proceeded with my morning...which was now off to a bad start.

Well, this morning the same thing happened. The stupid thing went off again. Another morning ruined, and I'm sure that this early morning fire drill wasn't scoring me any points with my neighbors either. So once again, I yanked the thing off the wall and, my patience being pretty much gone with all warning devices, disconnected the battery in the back before sticking it back up on the wall. And while I'm pretty sure that I'm violating some sort of fire code, at least I'm ensuring that my mornings won't be starting with a jolt, though I realize that I now may sleep through a fire and be burnt to a crisp one day.

But until I can find a smoke detector smart enough to tell the difference between 'smoke' and 'steam', this is a risk that I'm willing to take.