I've calmed down after yesterday. You may have seen my post on Facebook about the buzz. At 5:30 yesterday morning when I let the little black wiener dog out for her morning constitutional, I heard an alarm noise coming from the basement. Yikes! After I finished my morning routine, I went down to see what was going on.
Upon first check, I couldn't see what the problem was. the noise seemed to be located in the first room, where there are lots of walls and floors. Noises tend to bounce. A lot. I checked both smoke alarms. Then I began to panic and started yanking the batteries out. Did I mention the alarm noise was really high pitched an annoying? It must have been irritating for the poor puppy. Still the noise didn't stop.
Paul came down and tried to assist. We looked at all the plug ins for the TV and the lights. We checked the furnace, but the noise hardly reached that room. Paul seemed unconcerned because he couldn't even hear it upstairs (I blame driving tractors in his youth). I got a bit pissy. It was a stressful situation.
Where was the noise coming from? Why the hell wouldn't it stop? I didn't want to leave for work because I was afraid we might come home and find Odie dead due to a gas leak. So Paul went off to work and I emailed my boss Jen to say I'd be late. Then I texted Kathy, the former owner of our place to see if she could shed any light on our noise torture mystery. Besides the detectors, she didn't have any thoughts on the matter. She very nicely answered though.
I finally broke down and called a local Plumbing and Heating Company who asked if I'd phoned MidAmerican Energy to check to see if we had a gas leak. Duh, why didn't I think of that? MidAmerican said they would send someone right out, and 45 minutes later my saviour knocked at the door. He had a $3,000 hand-held gas sniffer and we headed downstairs - he could hear the noise of torture right away, but he headed into the furnace room. Nope - no gas leak.
So he began to look around. A veteran at these kinds of things, he zeroed in on the battery pack for our exercise bike. When he pressed on it, the noise faltered. Waalaa! That's it. I wanted to go get a hammer and smash it. He asked for a Phillips screw driver and calmly dismantled the thing and removed the 4 apparently dead batteries that were the root of all evil. Again I wanted to bash them. On the way out the door he recalibrated our carbon monoxide detector. MidAmerican gets two thumbs up from this girl! Thank goodness I didn't end up with a $75 service call for that!
This story reminds me of a time nearly 30 years ago - I was working at Fox River Mills, the sock factory in Osage. Karla Smith and I ran the computer department and we kept hearing an alarm we thought was coming from the IBM System 38 computer. We called for service but the tech couldn't find a thing wrong with it. But we kept hearing that noise. Finally we heard that noise again - only to discover, again like a ventriloquist, it was the smoke alarm on the ceiling. The battery was going bad.
I arrived at work yesterday just in time for our 9 a.m. Staff Meeting. Not the way I planned to start my week. My love/hate relationship with electronics was starting the week with hate! But you gotta laugh.
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