Beep...beep...beep…

You may have read the title and had one of many thoughts about his post…

Was the alarm clock going off?

Was the house alarm going off?

Did a reminder just make an alert on a smartphone?

Did Craig just cuss and mute himself?

Was a smoke detector battery out? 

If you guessed the last one, you nailed it…of course, the picture gave a pretty good hint too...

I don’t cuss (look at this post (serious) or this one too (funny)), but I sure was tempted one night this past week. 

I had a smoke alarm battery die right in the middle of he night - 3:00 AM! I was sound asleep and my wife heard it and woke me up to correct the issue. It’s not an easy issue to correct. We have several detectors in our home and they sound the same when hey go off. They only go off every 10-15 seconds, so you have to stand under each one to figure out which one is going off. 

I dizzily walked the house to figure out which one was alerting me and found that it was downstairs. There are three downstairs, but I checked each one (pulling he battery) and the noise was still occurring. I figured out which one it was and it just kept beeping, even when I puled the battery. I replaced the battery - glad we had some 9-volt’s sitting around - and went back to try to go to sleep.

Many questions came to mind…

Why do the smoke alarm batteries always go dead in the middle of the night?

Why don’t the LED lights change color when they are bad, so you know which one is bad?

How do they keep beeping with a dead battery?

Why did my wife even hear it, when no one else did? Why do wives have incredible hearing ability?

What is the purpose of three different smoke detectors within 8 feet of one another?

Why isn’t there a smoke detector required in my kitchen? Isn’t that a likely fire starting spot?

Do the detectors have a sleep sensor that tells them to wait until families are asleep before they go off?

I let the noise and the negative affect me, unlit I thought for a minute...

I was frustrated, but realized that this kind of thing happens to everyone.

It took a few minutes to get back to sleep, but I was able to sleep the rest of the night.

I was thankful that the alarm was just a battery and not a fire.

I realized that this was a minor thing, compared to some friends of mine with cancer.

I am blessed to live in a house that has smoke detectors.

I am grateful that I can hear.

When you turn a negative situation into a positive thought, you will always come out better in the end. I could have let the smoke detector control my night and the next day (BTW - I did a little, so I struggle too), but instead, looking at the positives, it actually made my day…

Lessons Learned: We all have negative things that occur in our days, but we don’t have to look at them as negative. Happy Friday the 13th.

Thoughts: What negative thing has you had happen to you? How did you look at it?

#failalot