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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2oLYFAj
man the other thing about smoke detectors is that having one means that if you start a fire, like, in your kitchen, while you’re cooking, the odds are pretty good that you see that it has happened, and are attempting to deal with this sudden emergency because you have to be pretty oblivious not to notice that your oven is pouring smoke or the thing on your burner just caught fire, and then you’re in the middle of that and suddenly this thing is going off loud enough to actually cause you physical pain with its noise, so now you have two emergencies, and one of them is that your kitchen is on fire, and the other is that you don’t know how to make this machine stop making the completely unnecessary but extremely distracting and painful noise it’s making. Like, no shit there’s a fire, your purpose is redundant.
i know, they’re super important, they save lives, because if a fire starts and you don’t smell it, you could die in your sleep. i get it.
but in my life the smoke detector in a single-dwelling home has far more often been its own panic-inducing emergency, piling on top of something actually going wrong that we already knew about. our dog used to get seizures because it scared her so much, so then it was like, three emergencies– put out the fire, stop that godawful noise, comfort the poor dog. i can’t tell you how tempting it wound up being to stop the noise first because it damn sure feels like a priority when it’s physically paining you. but no, you really ought to put the fire out first, good luck concentrating and making good decisions ha ha you poor asshole.
so i get it. i need to install one. everyone must have one at all times.
but i hate those fucking things.
for the record, i do have fire extinguishers all over my house and in the yurt. I haven’t ever practiced using them because so far in my entire life I’ve never set anything on fire that I couldn’t pretty easily make not be on fire without a fire extinguisher, but b-i-l said he has one of the rechargeable ones at the farm and was thinking of doing a session where everyone practices using it and then he goes and gets it recharged, because it’s old and probably expiring. So. it’s not that i hate fire safety. i just fucking hate smoke detectors.
I actually think they’re made like that so that you’ll break them trying to shut them off, and then need to buy a new one. Everything’s like that nowadays, everyone figured out that the way to Succeed at Late-Stage Capitalism is to make your only options shitty and disposable so that you buy more, because there’s literally no incentive to make a durable, easy-to-reuse quality product. Am I a million years old? is this when i slide irrevocably into middle age? probably but here we are: smoke detectors suck on purpose or they’d have a wall switch you can hit to instantly and easily disable them for the next hour while you actually dealt with having set your oven on fire. fuck, if you could pre-emptively hit it when you did something like blacken catfish, that’d be golden, because nothing fucks up your high-stakes cooking experiments like having to stop in the middle of something really time-sensitive to go smash a thing on the ceiling with a broom handle until it stops shrieking at you about something you damn well know about.
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man the other thing about smoke detectors is that having one means that if you start a fire, like, in your kitchen, while you’re cooking, the odds are pretty good that you see that it has happened, and are attempting to deal with this sudden emergency because you have to be pretty oblivious not to notice that your oven is pouring smoke or the thing on your burner just caught fire, and then you’re in the middle of that and suddenly this thing is going off loud enough to actually cause you physical pain with its noise, so now you have two emergencies, and one of them is that your kitchen is on fire, and the other is that you don’t know how to make this machine stop making the completely unnecessary but extremely distracting and painful noise it’s making. Like, no shit there’s a fire, your purpose is redundant.
i know, they’re super important, they save lives, because if a fire starts and you don’t smell it, you could die in your sleep. i get it.
but in my life the smoke detector in a single-dwelling home has far more often been its own panic-inducing emergency, piling on top of something actually going wrong that we already knew about. our dog used to get seizures because it scared her so much, so then it was like, three emergencies– put out the fire, stop that godawful noise, comfort the poor dog. i can’t tell you how tempting it wound up being to stop the noise first because it damn sure feels like a priority when it’s physically paining you. but no, you really ought to put the fire out first, good luck concentrating and making good decisions ha ha you poor asshole.
so i get it. i need to install one. everyone must have one at all times.
but i hate those fucking things.
for the record, i do have fire extinguishers all over my house and in the yurt. I haven’t ever practiced using them because so far in my entire life I’ve never set anything on fire that I couldn’t pretty easily make not be on fire without a fire extinguisher, but b-i-l said he has one of the rechargeable ones at the farm and was thinking of doing a session where everyone practices using it and then he goes and gets it recharged, because it’s old and probably expiring. So. it’s not that i hate fire safety. i just fucking hate smoke detectors.
I actually think they’re made like that so that you’ll break them trying to shut them off, and then need to buy a new one. Everything’s like that nowadays, everyone figured out that the way to Succeed at Late-Stage Capitalism is to make your only options shitty and disposable so that you buy more, because there’s literally no incentive to make a durable, easy-to-reuse quality product. Am I a million years old? is this when i slide irrevocably into middle age? probably but here we are: smoke detectors suck on purpose or they’d have a wall switch you can hit to instantly and easily disable them for the next hour while you actually dealt with having set your oven on fire. fuck, if you could pre-emptively hit it when you did something like blacken catfish, that’d be golden, because nothing fucks up your high-stakes cooking experiments like having to stop in the middle of something really time-sensitive to go smash a thing on the ceiling with a broom handle until it stops shrieking at you about something you damn well know about.
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no subject
Date: 2018-03-05 03:16 am (UTC)Not only did it go off when the bacon I was cooking wasn't even burned, it was Right There next to me with no walls between me and the noise and ugh. Yeah. No room in my head for any thoughts other than Turn It Off.
I took the batteries out and got lectured by the fire inspector person when he came back to see if our landlord had indeed given us another smoke detector. But like. It was maybe 10 feet away from the stove. Not a reasonable thing.