(Wo)Man vs Machine

Tuesday morning I had a big call with a new potential client. I had to be at their office at 9 am so I wanted to be up at like 6:30 to get ready, get there early, hit Starbucks and get myself ready. So Monday night I was in bed at 10:30 reading and I was asleep by 11. Perfect. Except I started having nightmares that I went to the call and it went all wrong and I was failing and there was this beeping that was alerting me to my inadequacies. That woke me right up. But the beeping didn't stop. I looked up and realized it was my smoke detector letting me know that the battery was dying. Awesome. So in my daze at 1 am, I head into the living room to get a kitchen chair to stand on. I pull it into my room, stand on it, and reach up. I can barely touch the detector because I have giant ceilings. So I grab a few books, stack them on top (not a good idea in hindsight), and stand on them twisting and turning the smoke detector. No luck. I can't figure out how to get this thing off.

After a vision of me showing up at this call in the morning twitching flashes through my head, I grabbed a pillow and headed to the living room to sleep on my couch. Oh, for those of you that haven't seen, this is my couch:



So yeah that wasn't going to end well anyway, but I could still hear the beeping. I decided to be productive about this and head down to the concierge desk to ask the dude how I get it stop. He says (in broken english - he's African), oh you just hit the arrow on the side of it like this, and makes a fist and pounds the air. I said, yeah well its like eight feet in the air so that's a lot easier said than done. He looks at me confused and stands up. I now understand his confused look. He's a giant. At least 7'. "No, you just look for the arrow on the side and hit it like this." "Riiight. ok thanks."

So I head back up to my apt, grab the chair again and a few books. I stretch to find the mysterious arrow on the side. I see it but realize no matter how many books I stack, I won't have the angle to be able to hit the detector hard enough. So I look around and spot my sneakers. I grab one and smack the detector on the side. I'm not actually sure what's supposed to happen at this point, so I wait for 30 seconds, until it beeps again. Ok so clearly that didn't work. I hit it again. And again. Until my final windup and pitch, I smack it so hard it goes flying off the ceiling and into my bedroom door, splitting into two pieces. Well, I'm still not sure if that was supposed to happen, but the battery was out, the detector was not beeping, and I could sleep again. I win.

Oh, and the call went really well in the morning too!