This column is dedicated to the employees and shareholders of the Rayovac Corporation – you’re welcome.
May you stand proud in knowing that Rayovac has been chosen as the official 9-volt battery provider for the Sevener household, specifically related to smoke detector maintenance – an honor that will result in the purchase of no less than 14,000 9-volt batteries from you in the years to come, thus not only serving to protect my family from the dangers of smoke and fires in the home, but also ensuring that your children will be able to attend the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the southeastern United States.
Hell, they’ll probably even be able to splurge and score a sweet pad just off of campus, but still in the heart of the party district, which would be totally bitchin’ … all thanks to smoke detector batteries.
I bring this up, of course, because earlier this week I finally got around to the seasonal initiative that is changing out all of the smoke detector batteries throughout the house. And I know what you’re thinking – sure, apparently we were supposed to change these puppies out a month and a half ago during that whole Daylight Savings Kerfuffle, but you might say that I was just a bit preoccupied fighting the good fight, and besides, frankly I would’ve been happy to procrastinate the whole process even longer if given the opportunity, but sometimes it’s amazing just how convincing the tiniest of little green lights can be when they’re flashing above your bedroom door at 2:00am and you’d much prefer to be not kept awake by their zany antics…
Of course, it doesn’t help that next to mopping the kitchen floor, it’s probably one of the most pain in the butt processes that you’re expected to do twice a year! If you’re anything like me, the whole ordeal seems to go a little something like this:
- Buy $14 worth of 9-volt batteries, thinking to oneself that you’ve never bought this many 9-volts at one time before in your life … not even at Christmastime.
- Spend twenty minutes wandering around your house, noticing random smoke detectors that you never really even knew existed, and subsequently changing their sparky, little batteries.
- Spend the next two hours trying to solve The Mystery of the Random Intermittent Chirp that now plagues your house like the ghost of your old Uncle Ernie who always ate way too much and annoyed the hell out of everybody when they all got together for Thanksgiving dinner. There it goes again!
- Thank god whether you’re a religious man or not when the incessant chirping finally does cease, thus permitting you to finally continue on with your Tuesday evening after what should’ve taken twenty minutes actually took upwards of three hours.
And granted, grumble all we want, they’ve got the sales pitch that’s pretty much bulletproof – you know, “Do it or we don’t want to hear any whining when your house burns down!” You just don’t mess with that logic, even after you finally get your hearing back a couple of days later once it’s had a chance to recover from the high pitched wails of intermittent obnoxiousness…
If anything, I suppose at the very least I can be grateful that it’s all over for another season, meaning that for the next six months I should be free to leave baking completely unattended and just go nuts with the decorative candles* – we’ll check back in about six months when it comes time to do the Daylight Savings Shuffle all over again.
…either that or when these little green lights start flashing up a storm – whichever comes first…
*Note: Comedic-Genius Media does not actually condone doing either of these things, especially not when said candles are those super-expensive ones from Yankee Doodle Candle or whatever. Seriously, who pays $49.95 for a hunk of wax that smells like the same flowers that you could just pick from your neighbor’s garden?!