It’s the little things that can ruin your day.
Two quirky things happened related to smoke alarms within the course of two weeks at my place.
In the book, I advocate for changing smoke alarm batteries every year but this year mine ran down in 11 months and I got a text from the guest about the chirping…. Ugh! Should I change the batteries every 6 months now and set the dates for around New Years and 4th of July as ticklers? It was time to switch out the batteries on this unit while the guests stepped out. Well, not so fast – I asked my business partner what kind of batteries it took, AAA or AA. He said the bigger AA ones – cool, I’m smart, so as I headed over to the house I stopped at Walgreens to get a fresh set of AA’s in case the stock at the house was low. Got to the house, dug the ladder out of the garage, climbed up and popped the detector to find it takes a 9 volt. You know the drill, back to Walgreens I go. Suffice to say, this derailed my day to the tune of about 3 hours; door to door to door to door to door to door.
Next smoke detector debacle – housekeeper called (not a text – so this was major) to say that the smoke detector in the living room was saying ‘FIRE!’, ‘FIRE!’. Yikes. Of course there was not a fire so was this 6 month old new style detector with a 10 year battery on the fritz? You can’t take a chance on a smoke detector that is malfunctioning as it may not report an actual fire or it could falsely report a fire. Either way, I needed to replace the unit. After a trip to Home Depot and installing the unit, I decide to read the manual that came with the new one. A couple paragraphs in, I read that dust can interfere and set it off. Hmm, housekeeper dusting and then the detector goes off – wasted another ¼ day driving around but oh well, at least now my old 10 year life detector that had another 9 ½ years now is replaced with one with a new 10 year life detector. Moral of the story is to realize that self-management means your schedule can get thrown off by anything, so have an assistant for these cases or just mentally prepare yourself for these episodes chasing your tail.
It’s the little things that can ruin your day but it’s those little things that make you a great, responsible host rewarded with rave reviews!
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