Sarahmus

OP here! Made an account to follow up. First time one of mine has ever made it. Thanks for the ideas, actually. If it had been an annoy-a-tron someone was going to die. Here’s what it actually was: Too Long, Won’t Read: Several people called it. I found a defective monoxide detector dying in a dark basement corner, but only after I went insane and and fought a tiny spider with a wooden sword. Further Reasonable Explanation: Six months ago I took down a defective monoxide detector and replaced it. When the defective one vanished from the kitchen table, I assumed it was thrown out. In reality, it had been returned to the basement and tossed into the dark reaches of the crap zone, awaiting the day the batteries would die (who put batteries back in it?!), freeing it to wreak havoc on my brain as it struck madness into man and drench my house in dog shit as it struck terror into beast, then luring me into its crappy, spider-filled lair to do battle and put it out of its lifelong pain once and for all. The way the sound seemed to move around the house, making it impossible to track? I had assumed it was the same volume the whole time, but it had become sporadic as the machine’s strength gave out. When it seemed loud in one spot at one moment and quiet when I came back, it really was just quieter, not farther away like I thought. I have now put the functional alarms back, since it was clearly not them making me crazy. Epic Tale Version: I had tracked it into the basement. It had to be there. Nowhere was it louder than here in the concrete box that is my basemen, but it was still on the move. I chased it back and forth louder here, then softer, then louder in the exact same place, from disabled smoke detector to disabled CO detector, ripped from the walls, gutted of their batteries, making no sound. And then it sounded right next to my head. After hours of jumping a the sound, this time I froze instead. I turned slowly, thinking, this is it, this is the child-sized carnivorous cricket sitting on a face level shelf, it has lead me here to devour my skin. I turned slowly. Nothing. No uber cricket, but also nothing else that could make that noise. 

It had to be on the other side. Good god. The shelf I was looking at sectioned off the storage part of the basement from the part humans might actually want to enter. It blocks a nasty cement wall from view and hides the various boxes of crap we want out of the way for most of the year: Christmas decorations, forgotten crap that has not seen daylight in a decade, and spiders. Good god, the spiders. There was the chirp again. Yes, it was definitely in the crap zone. I peered in. I did not see any exotic looking torture devices planted by the NSA to turn me into a supervillain. I did, however, see at least one spider. Not 100% past a long-time fear of them, I didn’t want to kill it with my bare hands, so I looked around for a suitable weapon. The nearest blunt implement? A wooden sword, left carelessly on top of the freezer, even though it has been firmly established that that is not where toys go. I grabbed it and waded forward, firmly vowing that by god, even if a spider crawled on my face I would not shit myself. Killed the spider. Nudged a few webs out of the way, also with the sword. A second spider scuttled over a box, narrowly avoiding the wrath of my blade. The chirp sounded right in front of me. My sphincter winked roguishly at the inside of my underwear, but did not fail, because damn it I am an adult. An adult, going slightly insane from an auditory version of Chinese water torture, hunting an inscrutable beeping sound, brandishing a wooden sword at spiders while knee deep in crap I should have organized years ago. I look around. Its here. I need one last chirp to find the exact location- There. There it is, in the corner. A small white device. I let out one final burst of my mighty battle cry: 

“GOD

 ******* 

DAMN IT” and seized the monstrosity, its final chirp dying on its speaker as I pried out the batteries. Victory was mine this day. Man conquered machine and madness, spider and sudden realization that my god I need to clean that basement this summer. And then man cleaned up an enormous amount of dog shit, again, because even though it would have been best to leave dog outside and not subject him to a repetitive high pitched sound that made him lose control of his anus, it was just too hot out for to leave him out there the whole time.

Hello! OP here! Nice little surprise when I woke up this morning! This happened to me about two months ago and my husband thought the situation was funny enough to post. I keep my phone on because my husband's 90-year-old grandmother lives in the same community as us and he's the first person she calls in case of emergencies. When he's off island on business trips, that responsibility falls on me. Since I'm a really heavy sleeper, I leave the ringer on pretty loud. And yes, I know there's a do not disturb function on my iPhone, but I never used it cause I've never gotten a phone call at such odd hours. I didn't check the number when I answered the first time cause I was already in a mad rush to wake up and find my phone without my glasses and freak out that something might've happened to grandma while my husbands away. I was pretty groggy when I answered and I guess the lady didn't appreciate the fact I kept saying "huh?" and "what?". She thought I was sleeping on the job or playing a prank on her and wanted to talk to my supervisor. I told her it was three in the morning and that she had dialed a Hawaiian residential number. There was a long pause and she just hung up. My phone rang a minute later from the same number, but it was a man this time. I told him the same thing and he gave me a half-assed apology and hung up. This happened for the next two nights (also rang during the day) and I found out from one of the calls that the shoe company had actually misprinted their 1-800 number on their packing slip (it was printed 1-808-XXX-XXXX). So I did start using the do not disturb function on my phone and I even changed my voice mail to tell people that this isn't the number they're trying to reach. However, some of them didn't even bother listening to my message and started leaving me voice mails. They were pretty funny. The shoe company specialized in plus-sized shoes for women, but I don't think they were very good. One lady got two left shoes and another was threatening to sue if she didn't get her refund. I already had to change my number back in December (a Samoan family somehow got my number and kept calling and intimidating me cause I apparently got beaten up by their son/brother/nephew/grandson and "it would be wise if you kept your mouth shut") and I was going to be charged $36 for a new number and I didn't want to deal with updating everyone my new number again. What I did end up doing was every time someone called, I'd start trolling them. Some highlights were Teniqua, angry black lady who was wondering why some woman is calling her baby daddy; Sugar **** Mandy, phone sex hotline; Rainbow Waterfall, hippie doomsday and conspiracy preacher; and my husband's, Dick Johnson, Swinging Salami Inc., every order gets you a free complimentary *****! The calls stopped coming about a week after we started trolling with a few stragglers here and there. Probably from people who dialed an 8 instead of a 0. We assumed either the shoe company finally fixed the mistake, changed their phone number, or went out of business. Happy to say I got my number back!