Our smoke alarm has been acting up lately. Every time you cook anything on the stove, you need to have the fan on at full blast to prevent the smoke alarm from piercing your ears. The other side effect of the alarm going off is that a man in blue suit shows up at your door to make sure everything is ok. They won’t ring the doorbell in case there is a gas leak (not sure how the smoke detector is supposed to detect gas) so as soon as the alarm goes off, you have to treck over to the front door, be ready to plea guilty and sign off on a piece of paper that you are not trying to burn the house down.

 

Lately, the alarm has been going off almost daily and the men in blue suits have become regular visitors at our door. On Sunday when we were cooking fish, the alarm screeched for a solid 20 minutes and wouldn’t turn off until David disconnected the wires to the wall. Our ayi had a look of horror on her face when she saw David yank the cords;

“But that is illegal!”

“Yes, indeed”, came his reply.

 

Which of course begs the question, if the detector is clearly not working properly, why haven’t we replaced it sooner? Because it hasn’t been “Replace your Smoke Detectors” week, until now.

 

Everything has an order. A few weeks back it was “Get your balconies glassed in” week, and a month earlier, “Get your stove checked for gas leaks” week. If something needs to be fixed or breaks out of order, well, that’s kind of too bad because you can’t have the smoke detector replaced when the workers are busy checking for air compressors.

 

So lucky for us, we got the management office to send a repair guy to take a look at our smoke detector. Result? They concluded that it actually does not detect smoke. They tested it several times and as many times it failed to detect the essence, smoke. What it did react to, was lemon. Yeah, that’s right. So all this time, we could have smoked our apartment to a crisp. But lo and behold we bring acid fruit in the house and a man in blue suit shows up at our door.

 

That’s one Lemon Detector.