You Bleeping Bastard!

Somehow I seem to have acquired a lot of regular readers in the past four or five months since I started this blog, and recently I hit the much sought after 100 followers mark. Embarrassingly, I let this momentous occasion pass by unannounced (but it was certainly not unnoticed, and I'd just like to say thanks to all of you!) I honestly have no idea how I managed to get this many followers. My blog is so random and doesn't really have a theme. I pretty much just write about what's occupying my head space on a particular day, which is why I didn't think it would be interesting to anyone except me. But apparently it is, so I must be doing something right. Right?

However...instead of celebrating my success in the blog world, I've been battling with household appliances.

Remember that episode of Friends called The One Where They're Up all Night? Remember what happened to Phoebe? (If you don't, Google it. You're on the internet, for Christ's sake.) Well, pretty much the same thing happened to me two nights ago. I was up at, like, 1 AM or thereabouts, and had hardly eaten all day so was cooking something quick in the microwave before I went to bed. As soon as I sat down to eat, the smoke alarm bleeped. It's quite a volatile little fucker and has a habit of freaking out if someone even dares to make toast. The unsuspecting (and hungry) victim is then forced to frantically wave a tea towel, book, item of clothing - anything in sight really - underneath it to clear any smoke and prevent the alarm from waking up the whole street, while desperately willing it to shut the hell up.

So as soon as it started, I resigned myself to my humiliating fate and grudgingly stood up. But it just bleeped once, then stopped. I sat back down. It bleeped again. And then again. After this had happened quite a few times, I figured it must be because the batteries were running low. I dragged my chair out to the hall and stood on it while trying to remove the battery from the alarm. Of course, it was stuck. Then the alarm bleeped in my face. Yeah, thanks for that. I eventually got the battery out, slammed it triumphantly on the table and sat back down. I picked up my fork to continue eating.

Bleep.

What the hell?! How did it do that? I got up again, walked over to the alarm and stood looking up at it in confusion and frustration.

Bleep...bleep...bleep.

It was starting to sound like it was laughing at me. But then I noticed something. At the other end of the hall, the carbon monoxide alarm was flashing. That c*nt hardly ever goes off...but when it does, it's LOUD. And piercing. That must have been it. It was so deafening that I could easily have mistaken it for the smoke alarm, which was closer. Even when it bleeped as I was fighting to pull the battery out of the smoke alarm fifteen feet away, it sounded like it was right in my ear.

By now I was beyond irritated and really getting quite pissed off with the whole fiasco. I'd wasted my time pulling the smoke alarm apart and the bleeping was beginning to give me a headache. I turned my rage onto the CO alarm, marching up to it and ripping it off the wall. Amazingly, this didn't deter it. Bleep, it said, looking innocently up at me. “Shut up!!!” I screamed in response, and threw it on the floor.

Bleep.

I wanted to cry. I picked up the thing that had now become my nemesis and turned it over to see if there were any instructions on how to silence it, before it succeeded in driving me insane. "When battery is low, alarm will emit a high-pitched chirp every twenty seconds" it read. No shit, Sherlock. So how do I stop the ridiculous high-pitched chirping? But it refused to tell me. There was nothing else for it. I fetched the hammer.

I'd love to finish this story by telling you that I went to bed and just as I closed my eyes...

Bleep!

...just because that would be a funny ending. But it'd also be a lie. The truth is, I won! I killed that bastard. I went to bed and slept soundly while it lay, defeated and in pieces, on the living room floor. Beaten by a girl. And I replaced both alarms the next day, because I'm responsible like that.

Then last night, my TV cut out.