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Where there's smoke

A while back, like a year ago, maybe more, Oz was being helpful. He was vacuuming the upstairs and decided to dust off the smoke detector by vacuuming it too. Ever since then, the smoke detector has been dangling by the wires that connect it to the house current.

This morning I decided to fix it. I was getting the stepladder out to change the light bulb at the top of the stairs, and the smoke detector is right there, so why not?

Well, I'll tell you why not. The little screws that the smoke detector is supposed to fit onto were just loosely clinging to the drywall instead of being firmly screwed into the electrical box or a metal plate. When I tried to fit the smoke detector onto the screws, they wobbled pathetically and worked their way even further out of the ceiling. Oz came up and helped me with it.

I said, "I think we need to get a new smoke detector." There was no place to reattach the screws. Besides, the old smoke detector is all nasty and putty-colored and we don't even know if it actually works.

He got up on the ladder and fiddled with it for a while. A long while. Eventually, he said, "I think we need to get a new smoke detector. Is Lowe's open yet?" He took the old one down. I went and put on my shoes.

When I came downstairs I found him digging at the smoke detector with a screwdriver. "I'm ready."

"I'm busy with this. I want to see how to get the front off it." Dig. Dig. Change to new screwdriver.

"Oh. We're just going to throw it away."

"I know. But I want to see."

"Okay." I got myself a slice of cheesecake. Yeah, it's 10:30 am, but we haven't had breakfast and I'm going to need something in my stomach. "You know, the label says there's radioactive material in there."

"You think Homeland Security will get after us?" Oz popped the top off and looked inside. It consists of odd components stuck to putty colored plastic. There's a place for a battery backup, but no batteries. Not that they'd still work, it's been well over ten years since anyone looked in there. "Okay, let's go."

I've barely started on the cheesecake. "No."

At Lowe's it only takes a minute to find the smoke detectors, but the process of finding screws takes much longer. And here's where the fundamental difference in our natures comes out. I approach the mind-numbing boredom of the fastener aisle in a business-like manner. Oz likes to shop. I hold up packets of various types of screws. He rejects them as too pointy, not the right size, not the right shape head, and browses among the drawers of specialty fasteners. He ended up selecting some of my finds (Hah!), but after all that, along with some sorting through the detritus of the hardware drawer at home, we ended up using the screws that were already in the electrical box holding up a metal plate which had the sole purpose of obstructing the installation of a smoke detector.

Am I conveying all the frustration of this process? I don't think I could. The damn thing kept beeping at us too, after we pressed the Test button, prompting cries of "Augh! Check the instructions! What does this mean?" From start to finish, this took two and a half hours, though that included time spent shopping for mulch while we were at Lowe's.

I now have a dainty white smoke detector, properly installed, and yet another weird thing done by the previous owner of my house has been undone.