BEEP BEEP BEEP

What a way to start the week. 5:00 in the morning I'm awoken by a deafening BEEP BEEP BEEP. My wife elbows me to say "Do you hear THAT?" Since she's having to yell over the noise to ask her question, I think the answer's pretty obvious, but I'm still too groggy to come up with an appropriately sarcastic response. Thoughts start running through my head: is it the fire alarm? Sounds like it, but it's coming from outside our room - if it was the fire alarm, the one in our bedroom would be going off (when one goes off they all go off - that's a fun experience!), but it wasn't. Was it the ADT alarm going off because somebedy had broken into the house? Probably not, since we never set the ADT anymore - I tripped it too many times going to work in the morning, forgetting it was on.

Turns out it is the carbon monoxide sensor outside of our bedroom. So after turning off the deafening alarm, we start tearing through all our "junk" drawers trying to find the instructions. We finally find them, and this is what it says "If the alarm gives 4 short beeps, pauses 5 seconds, then gives 4 short beeps, and repeats this pattern, thins indicates an alarm situation. If the alarm beeps intermittently every 25-30 seconds, this indicates a unit malfunction."

Just fucking great - I get woken up from a dead sleep by an ear-splitting electronic noise and I'm supposed to be counting the number of beeps? I'd like to meet the genius who thought it would be a great idea to signal a life-threatening situation like high levels of CO, and a non life-threatening situation like a malfunction, with the same, incredibly loud alarm.

So we cracked a few windows (great idea when it's 20 degrees hotter outside than inside, even at 6:00 AM), reset the alarm, and prayed it was just a false alarm. Amazingly, our daughter slept through the whole thing, and the alarm was right outside her door. She just have inherited my ability to sleep through anything.

But if it goes off again, we're calling 911. Must be Monday...