This morning, about 3:45am, I woke up to a loud beeping.  I thought it would go away, but alas it did not.  I felt Gina wrestle and move in bed.  Well, I decided, it’s time to be a man and take care of it.

I first thought that it was just a smoke detector and I was thinking where our step-stool was, but when I stood by every smoke detector we had on the main floor, the beep didn’t come from that.  So I figured it was our carbon monoxide detector.  I had it off the wall and was just going to open it up, but I heard the beep again — and it wasn’t from the device in my hand.  Now I was totally confused.

I stood by the basement stairs, thinking that it couldn’t be coming from down there and then I heard the beep yet again — and this time it was right beside me.  I looked and found the source — the house alarm system, which we don’t even have hooked up.  I figured I would just take the battery out.  A quick look showed that it didn’t even had screws — just tabs to pop down.  So I grabbed a screwdriver and popped the front off.  The dumb thing didn’t have batteries — just power cables going straight downstairs.  It beeped again in it’s glee.

So I went to the (cold) basement and unplugged it.  When I got back upstairs to check it, I saw that the controller still had powered.  And the it taunted me again with a beep.

This was exactly like a Friends episode.  I went downstairs with my screwdriver, because I figured it would be handy.  I followed the (unplugged) power cable to a large, brown metal box and was, of course, screwed shut.  But, hey, I had my screwdriver! I unscrewed the cover, opened it up, and saw a bunch of electronics and bare wires going every which-way.  I looked at the diagram in the inside of the door but it didn’t make sense to me — probably because it was 4am.  But I was able to figure out where the hot wires were attached to the circuit board.  Again, I used my trusty (yet not sonic) screwdriver and unattached the wires.  As I went upstairs I heard more beeping — this time in shorter intervals.  I couldn’t believe it still had power, but there were still more wires to undo.  So I went back down and removed two more wires.  Silence.  I went up the stairs and noted that there was no power in the access panel.  I had won!!  And I finally crawled back into the warm bed at 4:16am, but didn’t get much sleep before my 5:55am alarm went off.

We hadn’t had our alarm system going for over a year, so I have no idea what caused it to start complaining all of a sudden.  But, irony of ironies — today in the mail we got an offer to hook us back up to the security grid.  Concidence?