So last Saturday night involved checking out the decent tunes of dot dash in the Phoenix cellar, with guests Davey and CJ. Things proceeded much as planned, laffs were exchanged etc. The fun part came after toiling like Trojans through to the wrong end of another all-night session.
We had variously laughed and dozed through Night of the Comet and were getting ready to fire up Shaun of the Dead with a fresh beer. To stave off impending hangover death I volunteered cooking duty for four (bacon and egg rolls).
Unfortunately for us the culinary industry set off the smoke alarms – somehow connected throughout all three flats on the floor. P did the host bit and grabbed the enormous step-ladder to deactivate the main smoke detector on the hall ceiling, a truly frightening 15 feet off the floor.
Buttons were pressed; heads were scratched and nothing happened except for the worsening effect of the hellish noise piercing our tender brains. Wired-in power from the mains meant we couldn’t just take out the batteries.
After much faffing around, the wall-penetrating, mind-buggering BWEEEP BWEEEP of the alarm eventually drove us into a frenzy and the action swiftly escalated into all-out war.
Corporal Moseley was promptly armed with the defusal toolkit, namely:
• 1 x crosshead screwdriver
• 1 x butter knife
• 1 x pair scissors
• 1 x worryingly impaired sense of balance
• 1 x fractured sense of self-preservation
and began a do-or-die mission of deconstruction. Once screws and casing were dismantled, all that was left to stop the continuing noise was random chopping with the scissors. Alas this didn’t agree with mains voltage and it all went a bit wrong.
Sadly rather than being turned into an Electro-style supervillain, P was subjected to a healthy shock accompanied by a loud POP and a shower of sparks in the now-darkness.
The comedy punchline was of course that the detector that we had been attacking had not been making any noise. The sound was mysteriously coming from an adjacent flat.
In the end all we could do was shut the doors, fetch a beverage and wait for it to stop (it did).
07-Oct-04 at 9:55 pm | Permalink
Me and wee Martin are always having 4AM fry-up smoke detector disasters, coupled with door-handle-falling-off-trapped-in-kitchen scenarios. No supervillain powers as of yet, though.