“It keeps beeping but it’s turned off . The switch
is pointing down. Just like the diagram Chris made for us, with the
funny little man whose hand points up, then down, to remind us which
is ON and OFF,” my mother complains to my husband over the long
distance telephone. Chris had made the Beep-Man diagram because my
father burned his English muffins each morning, insisting that he
liked charcoal, that it was good for his digestion. He’d turn off
the alarm in annoyance when it went off , then not remember to turn
it on for days, worrying us all. “It’s been beeping for three days
now and is driving us crazy. You work for GE, so fix the bloody GE
smoke alarm!” she demanded. Richard buys new batteries and mails
them to my elderly parents, now in their late eighties. Their
neighbors help install the batteries and hang the smoke alarm back
on the kitchen wall. My mother calls us again a week later.
“It’s still beeping. Maybe GE batteries aren’t any
good either.”
Chris, our son, arrives from New York City with a
new fully charged set of batteries that Friday. He installs them
carefully, according to my husband’s directions, checks the plus and
minus connections, that the batteries are in tightly, etc. After
sharing a stew and dumpling dinner at their house, Chris calls us in
Syracuse N.Y. to say,
“It’s still beeping.”
Two weeks later I drive six hours to visit my
parents, with yet another set of new batteries. I follow all
directions perfectly. It’s a no go.
When my mother next calls, beside herself, Richard
says, “Well, take it down from the wall. I’ll buy you a new alarm.”
She calls an hour later, frantic. Whining, “We took the alarm down.
Now the wall is beeping!”
“The wall?”
“Yes, the wall is beeping. We threw out the smoke
alarm in the garbage can in the garage. We still hear the beeping
from the spot where it used to hang on the wall. It is a ghost
beep.”
By now my engineer husband is intrigued, frustrated
and baffled. Hundreds of theories parade through his head. Finally
he goes to visit them with a new alarm, batteries and his tool kit.
Sure enough, there’s the monotonous metronomic smoke alarm beep in
the kitchen. After a massive hunt and considerable out-of-the-box
thinking, he finds a second smoke alarm in the kitchen, under a heap
of rags at the bottom of a closet near the infamous beeping wall. It
was long forgotten by my parents and was announcing to all that its
battery was running low.
Richard hangs the new alarm on the old spot on the
wall, next to Chris’ on/off instruction reminder.
GE makes a good product.
A few days later my mother calls.
They miss the beeping.
