Thursday, August 7, 2008

Please don't be a spaceship

The last owners of my house were very concerned with fire safety. They installed smoke detectors everywhere.
I think there are seven, in fact.
They're all hard-wired into the house, with battery backup. I feel very well-protected.
But.
But seven smoke detectors in a house this size means that at least some of them are very close together.
Which means that, if a person were wakened from a dead sleep at, say, 3:12 in the morning by the once-a-minute, ear-splittingly loud chirping of one of those smoke detectors, it might take her a long time to figure out which one it was. Once-a-minute is a horrible interval. It is not long enough to go back to sleep, but it is too long to be useful in trying to figure out which of the four smoke detectors in a ten-foot radius it is.
And once that person figured that out, her awareness that she was behaving exactly like this:

would not prevent her from behaving exactly like that.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You need a fire detector detector.