7974/20915
I used to feel like I was in a sitcom written by fucking hacks about once a month, but nowadays it's closer to once a day. I am an absolute joke and I am pretty sure my whole life is some kind of elaborate prank.
Hey look I am tired from the moving and the podcasting and stressed out so things are going to go wrong. But the things that are happening to me are just too constructed to be true.
So over the last couple of days the smoke alarm in my office has been doing that dead battery beep. This morning, amidst doing lots of house admin - including getting my tour car tyres checked (two new ones, Hitchin kwikfit has managed to sell me six new tyres in under a month) and having a man round to find out why the boiler is occasionally not working (probably some air in the system, but it's an old boiler and there is the danger of great expense on the horizon) and having our curtains fitted (sorry, people who live in the houses behind me, you will no longer be able to see me naked through my bedroom window - unless you put in a special request - and I will never stop putting my cock through your letterbox) - I bought a battery to fix the thing. I can't work with a beep going off every couple of minutes and it'd be annoying for podcast records.
I have had some experience with smoke alarms (though never fully found out why the one at the old house would occasionally beep in a short burst in the middle of the night and then stop) and got the unit off the ceiling pretty easily, changed the battery, reattached the unit and was done. Nothing could be simpler. I had fixed the problem and felt pretty g... BEEP.
I couldn't believe it. I'd changed the battery and the thing was still beeping. Maybe the unit was old and it was time to replace it. But no the date on the side said it was good to 2030. I googled it and the advice was to hoover the alarm or alternatively to keep the test button pushed for 30 seconds so the power. I did this. It seemed to have done the trick and I was glad my nightm... BEEP.
I tried discharging the current from the unit, but that didn't make a difference, I tried looking inside the ceiling bit to see if there was a battery in there too. The unit was off the ceiling and had no battery in it so surely that would sort out the prob.... BEEP.
How was this possible? The ceiling bit shouldn't have a beeper in it.
There are a couple of other smoke alarms in the vicinity so I decided to just remove the whole thing and unscrewed it from the ceiling. But it was pretty impressively and conclusively patched into the mains and I worried that I might electrocute myself, so I screwed it back up again.
Wait -could I just turn off the circuit with the smoke alarm on it? As long as it wasn't the same one as the plugs then that would give me some respite until a proper man could come over. One of the switches on the fuse box even had a sticker saying smoke alarm underneath it.
I flicked it.
Nothing.
Nothing.
I'd finally done it. No one could call me stup.... BEEP.
The comic timing of this thing was perfect. I could already see this working as a movie starring an ever more exasperated Rowan Atkinson. I had spent a couple of hours of my time on this thing. I was tweeting about it and people were telling me all the things I had to do, but I'd already done them.
But these people put enough doubt in my mind to make me question my own ears. Was the beep definitely coming from this smoke alarm and not one of the others. I went and stood by them and waited. The wait always seemed too long. But then the beep would come and it would clearly be in another room or down the stairs, just where the smoke alarm was. And yet when directly under the alarm itself it did sometimes feel like it was coming from somewhere else.
I was on the edge of madness by this stage. Why was this happening to me? After all the other technical nightmares I've had this week (and I don't even want to get into trying to move the car charger on to the Octopus network, which I've still failed to do).
Finally I remembered that the builders had left some old bits of stuff around which I'd piled up by the door in case they still needed any of it. It included a carbon monoxide alarm, cut down from the mains. I held it for a while until the next beep came. It took a while. Of course the beep was coming from this alarm all along.
The only way that the writers could have improved this scene was to have me finally smash the smoke alarm with a cricket bat, then jump up and down on it, only for the beep to come again and for me to realise then that it came from a totally different source. But I'd come pretty close to breaking the smoke alarm anyway, so I shouldn't be giving notes.
I didn't really know what to do with the beeping carbon monoxide alarm> Can it go in the bin or is it powered by nuclear energy. I put it in the shed in the garden, which isn't that far away. I can still feel it's plaintive muffled beep.
RHLSTP guest news. James Acaster will be joining me and Count Binface at the Leicester Square Theatre next Monday.
Tickets here. Selling fast unsurprisingly.
And there's another guest announcement in the badger and plusser secret area.
