If there's one thing life's pretty good at, it's knocking you down a peg or two whenever you get a little full of yourself.
The list of things I'm pretty good at is ever-evolving, but it's not especially long. I'm pretty good at picking music for a party. If a song comes on the radio, I can generally tell you with a decent degree of accuracy how many beats per minute its tempo is. I'm rather skilled at watching TV for problematically lengthy time periods. I know an absurd amount of useless pop culture trivia. I strangely have a decent sense of direction and seldom get lost.
Oh, and one other thing: I've become pretty good at cooking. I mean, probably not as good as most of you. But compared to where I was a few years ago? I'm Julia Child compared to THAT guy. There was once a time when my greatest culinary triumph was successfully adding the Helper to the hamburger, and I've even been known to screw THAT up. But during the pandemic, I decided it was time to learn some basic cooking skills. One Instant Pot, one air fryer, and eleventy-jillion Youtube videos later, I can actually make meals for myself without burning the house down.
Or so I thought.
Last Friday, I decided to grill a couple brats on my lunch hour using the "smokeless grill" setting on my air fryer. It lied. As they were cooking, nature came a-calling, so I used the opportunity for a quick rest in the restroom. It wasn't quick enough. Nothing puts a spring in one's step off the toilet quite like thick smoke rolling past the bathroom door.
Apparently no one told the air fryer it was "smokeless." The brats had split their casing, and all that deliciousness was dripping to the bottom of the grill and turning into a toxic fog cascading out of my kitchen in dramatic fashion. It looked like the Sisters of Mercy were about to play a gig in my dining room.
I unplugged the air fryer and opened a nearby window, but it was too late. Before I could even utter a single swear word, my upstairs smoke detector started going off. I raced upstairs to shut it off and suddenly found myself completely clueless as to how one does that. There was no obvious off-switch or reset button. The sound was so shrill, so loud, and so piercing that I couldn't even think. In desperation, I ripped it off the wall and it just kept on beeping. I ran with it downstairs, popped the back off the thing, and spent the next five minutes desperately trying to pry the batteries out of their hermetically-sealed compartment.
All the while, the alarm is Bluetoothed to my security system, which meant somewhere someone in a monitoring center was dispatching a fire brigade to my house. By the time I got the infernal alarm shut off and reached them to cancel the call, I was a nervous wreck. My ears were ringing. My cats were running concentric circles around the house. Instead of a relaxing lunch hour, I returned to work with frayed nerves and a wicked migraine and frayed nerves. But that was just the opening act of my holiday weekend.
On Sunday, I stayed up way too late watching bad TV and didn't get to bed until the wee hours. At about an hour past wee, I woke up to the gentle lullabye of my security alarm once again shrieking. I always felt safe going to sleep in the comforting knowledge that my house was being guarded by a security system. I never realized that triggering it in the middle of the night runs the distinct risk of scaring me dead.
My first thought was, "AM I DYING?" My second thought was, "IS THE WORLD ENDING?" My third thought was re-assuring: "No, silly, it's your security alarm going off. The world isn't ending. You're simply about to be murdered is all." Someone must have been breaking in. Good thing I had left a deadly weapon on the nightstand. That deadly weapon? A dessert fork. Whoever was breaking into this house picked the wrong midnight snacker to mess with.
I crept out of the bedroom with dessert fork in ninja attack stance. The alarm was just as shrill and migraine-inducing as ever, but the second I walked out of the bedroom, it stopped and I almost screamed. Suddenly, a voice echoed throughout my house and I DID scream. "Mr. Brown? Sanjay at monitoring. Are you alright?" It was my security company.
"I have no idea," I yelled into the air. "Someone might be here, Sanjay. But I'm armed!" (I left off "...with a dessert fork.")
"Mr. Brown," Sanjay said, "The sensor is indicating that someone has tampered with your smoke detector which is what set off the alarm. Can you verify please?"
I don't know much about home intruders, but here's what I do know. Odds were pretty slim that a na'er-do-well would break in and sneak up flights of stairs while carrying the stepladder necessary to maliciously reach and tamper with said smoke detector. Apparently, when I remounted the smoke detector to the wall last weekend, I messed something up.
"Sanjay, no one tampered with my smoke detector except me a few days ago."
"Sir," he replied, "Can you try turning it off and on again?"
The list of things I'm pretty good at remains small. I'm no longer including cooking on that list. However, the list of things I'm BAD at now most definitely includes "rebooting smoke detectors at 3:24 a.m. with my friend Sanjay."
For the record, those brats were pretty tasty.
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