Ah That Singing, Hear it Ringing

Beep bee bee bee beep. Beep bee bee beep. The infernal noise will not stop. Beep bee bee beep. This time its Taryn's alarm clock, a small courtesy gift Paul was given as a token of thanks by a company a few years back. We found it in our move and Taryn commandeered it as her own, set the alarm, and now it goes off at six p.m. every night. One or all of us generally runs up the stairs to find it, but it had been lost in the bowels of her bedroom and it usually finally shuts itself off before we could track it down. My visiting teacher was over the other day when it went off and suggested we find it an remove the batteries, but it is powered by a combination solar panel and built in battery that isn't removable.

The small clock folds flat, but opens into a triangular piece with a screen on top for the time and a keypad on bottom for the calculator feature. Taryn came to me the other day, with the plastic keypad surface in one hand and the clock in the other, wanting me to fix it. I struggled to put it back together for about 15 minutes, but it wouldn't snap back in. Then I had an epiphany-if the clock were broken and disposed of, it could not sound off in the middle of dinner each night. I declared the clock un-fixable and dropped it into the kitchen garbage.

Beep bee bee beep. Beep bee bee beep. It's six o' clock and the sound of the alarm is coming from under the sink in the kitchen. I take the garbage out to the bin outside, but by the time I get it out there the alarm has stopped.

Of course, garbage day is still a few days away, and precisely at six the next night, we hear the faint sound of the alarm filtering into the house from all the way outside by the garage. Beep bee bee beep. Beep bee bee beep.

Finally on Thursday morning the garbage man hauled away the trash and for one night, we had peace. Then on Friday at 11 p.m. the familiar noise started to chime, Beep bee bee beep. Beep bee bee beep. The sound was faint, but it was clearly an alarm sounding off. Where was it coming from? I opened the front door, fearful that the clock had fallen from the bag into the bottom of the can and hadn't been dumped with the rest of the trash. No, the sound wasn't coming from outside, or from upstairs in Taryn's room, so she hadn't rescued it from the trash. Beep bee bee beep. Still going. I opened the door to the basement and the sound grew louder. I wondered aloud whether it was some sort of alarm, maybe on the sprinkler system or water softener-signaling an action to be taken. No, everything was in order, but still the beeping continued. We searched the playroom, to finally discover at the bottom of a pile of toys another small alarm clock, ringing with its whole heart. It turned itself off just as I picked it up, and flicked the ringer to the "off" position.

Then we had two days of peace. No alarms ringing either at six or at eleven.

Then last night at nine, I heard the beeping from the basement again: Beep bee bee beep. Beep bee bee beep. One of the kids had apparently switched it back on when they were playing down there as part of their calculated efforts to drive me batty. What I can't help finding ironic about the whole scenario is that of the four of us, none use an alarm to wake in the morning. When Paul is traveling, he uses a preset on his phone, and at home we usually wake up to either the kids or the animals wanting breakfast. We have no reason for even owning an alarm clock, arguably one of the worst ways to wake up. The one going off downstairs does take batteries, and I'm headed down there now to remove them.

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