Local Trivia: CO.M.G.

Last week I came home to an apartment with the distant sound of a four-beep alarm coming from the vents. I had no idea what it meant -- four beeps, then five seconds off (I timed it), then four beeps again -- so after a short investigation to figure out if it was coming from the other apartment on the second floor, or below me, I let it go.

It turns out that it was the carbon monoxide detector my landlords had installed. I found this out after several hours in the house, at which point the landlady came home and shut it off, figuring it was malfunctioning.

Which was pretty scary to me since, you know, you can't detect CO otherwise. But then we didn't die, so I figured things were fine.

Thanks to a weird smell coming up from the vents on Friday night, I slept with the windows open and my electric blanket, Weirdo Brown, on. I'd probably been primed by the CO detector experience, but this weird smell also tied my stomach in knots and gave me a headache, and I figured better safe than accidentally dead.

I thought all my smelly and non-smelly gas woes were apartment-bound -- but last night, here at work and only a half hour after I'd gone to sleep, the CO detector started going off around 1 a.m.

This was more panic-inducing than it had been at my apartment, since now I knew what it was and was responsible not only for myself, but for the girl I work with. What if she died of CO poisoning? Should I call the manager on call at 1 a.m.? Should I call the fire department? Should I open the windows and turn on a space heater?

I took it out of the plug, which turned out not to be the answer, since that caused it to sound continuously. Eventually, after covering it in blankets for awhile, I plugged it back in, pushed the "test/reset" button, which made it stop alarming, and went back to bed.

Then I got up, just to check on whether the girl was alive. She was.

I went back to bed.

And got up again to look at the alarm, which seemed all green lights and still-silenced alarms, so I went back to bed.

At 1:16 I got up again and looked up the alarm manual online. This is incredibly difficult to do without pulling up horror story after horror story of families who barely escaped death when their homes filled with carbon monoxide -- which was scary, but also annoying enough to make me more apathetic about possible death. ("How bad can it be compared to this?")

At 1:37, I solved the mystery. Apparently, if the alarm sounds, the thing to do is press the test/reset button. If the alarm goes off again within 6 minutes, you have a problem. Otherwise, you can go back to sleep.

So I did. But if one more CO detector does this to me, I might just go live in a tent in the woods.

You all are invited to visit.