Not Gaza and not Ukraine!

Imagine it’s the middle of the night and suddenly you hear a loud beep that keeps on repeating itself every 30 seconds? You reluctantly get up, try to find your bearing and most importantly, look for a solution to silence the source of noise. 

Yes, it’s was one of my combo carbon-monoxide/smoke detector that is perched on top of our 14’ ceiling in the living room, so I needed to fetch the biggest ladder I had inside our garage, carry it to right spot, unfold it, climb it, study the reasons for the problem and try to experiment with whatever tools and ideas I could come up that early in the morning. 

This is not the first time I’ve been faced with this situation! A first solution seemed to work, so I went back to bed, but after 15 minutes it began beeping again. At that point, I struggled for another 30 minutes before finding a way to disconnect and silence the whole system so we could catch a few more hours of sleep. 

The next day I called the manufacturer to find out that the unit was dead. I had a pretty bad night, but nothing in comparison to the nights some people have these days in Gaza or in Ukraine. When I reached that conclusion, I became grateful for my low-intensity, first-world “problems...”