Beware?

Bev and I are in the middle of a notification battle these days. The battle lines are sharply drawn. It is us against the machine.  What was once trusty and reliable, has turned its back on us.  It appears that one of our eight smoke detectors has started to cry wolf at random times during the night. I suppose days in addition to the nights but don't know for sure. We are only home at night and so can only verify the nightly two second wake up calls. Very effective!  Sound asleep at 2:49, then sitting upright with a gallon of adrenaline coursing through my veins, using my super Bassett hound senses, sniffing, comparing all molecules. No smells that could be classified as smoke. Back to sleep with the fervent prayer there will be no more detection until after 5:00 a.m.

As this has gone on, we have been paying less and less attention. Sure the shrieking alarm still cuts through you, but there are no 2:00 a.m. walks through the house sniffing and trying not to stub the toes on some foreign object which would produce more sleep killing adrenaline. I might be awake for days with two gallons of adrenaline. We struggle back to sleep hoping that when there is a fire the rest of the alarms will over ride the attention starved alarm and notify us of the danger in plenty of time. This had gone on for a week and Saturday, I took matters into my own hands and got out the vacuum cleaner and tried to suck the offending particles out of all of the smoke detectors, which made it worse. Rather than once every 8 hours, the whiner was going off once every hour. Often enough that it was horribly annoying but not often enough or long enough to isolate the offending alarm. So at 11:30 last night after two jarring wake up calls, I went through the house and unhooked every smoke detector. The plan now is to hook one up each evening until the offender is caught and then replaced.

Hopefully, we will be fire free for the next few nights until we get back online. That is the conundrum; staying vigilant for a disaster against an erratic backdrop of warnings with little or no real danger befalling you. Smoke? Fire. Smoking? Cancer. Seatbelt less? Injury, Sugar? Diabetes. Snow storm? Cannibalism. Talk show? Oprah. We get the initial warning and are scared of the consequence for a while. But it doesn’t stick. Nothing happens. We drive without a seat belt and arrive safely. We light up and enjoy the kick from the nicotine. It snows and we eat French toast with the milk, eggs and bread that we bought the night before. We watch Jerry Springer and then Opr . . . Okay bad example.

But you get my point. The random blasts, from the council to prevent all bad things, wear you down. They are all the same. No matter the real risk, the claxon is sounded with equal ferocity; ratcheting up the ferocity when your attention wanes. Finally when the scared no longer cower at the distant consequence, the council sponsors legislation that will bring the consequence into immediate and sharp focus. So now we have; Smoking? Three dollar a pack tax. Seatbelt less? $25 fine. Cholesterol? Trans-fat free cities.

Why do we go along? Why don’t we say “No, this is broken. I choose not to be frightened by you.”?

Maybe we need to be scared. Maybe life is too tame so we assign the council to prevent all bad things the task.

Take care,

Roger