Why do smoke alarms hate me?

It's 4 am when I'm suddenly startled out of a good dream by an incessant beeping.  In my dream I was James Bond and I was fighting against Jaws (the henchman, not the shark) and some Russians.  It was awesome!  But, alas, it wasn't meant to be as this annoying beeping prevented me from getting to the end.  And what was the beeping coming from, you might ask?  What else could it be but the smoke alarm telling me the battery was dead!  Of course this has to happen at 4 am!  It always does.  And why is that?  It seems like smoke alarms only beep in the middle of the night.  But I digress.

So after being woken up, I decided to find out where the beeping was coming from.  If it was an easy to reach smoke alarm I would change the battery and hopefully resume my peaceful slumber.  But no, it was coming from an alarm high up on one of my vaulted ceilings.  I would need a ladder to reach it and the ladder was deep in the garage.  I was not about to exert the amount of effort needed to get the ladder at that hour of the night.  So I shut my bedroom door and put on some music to try to drown out the beeps.  It didn't work.  All I could hear every 30 seconds was, 'BEEP!'  So I tried to play some games on my ipod to tire my eyes and make me fall asleep.  Nothing.  Then suddenly, at around 5:15, the beeping stopped.  What the hell?!  As happy as I was that it stopped I was pissed that it was ever beeping at all.  And now after keeping me up for over an hour it just decides it's done?!  Not cool, smoke alarm.  Even without the beeping falling asleep proved difficult as I spent the next hour and a half drifting in and out of that half asleep-half awake stage until I actually did have to get up to go to work.  And to make things worse, during the half asleep phase instead of picking up my James Bond dream I had an awful dream about being asked to stop coming to camp!  (Those of you who know me know how much my camp means to me.)  So basically, the smoke alarm kicked my ass in all aspects last night.

But, wait, the story's not over yet!  Even though the alarm wasn't beeping anymore, for whatever reason, I didn't want it to start beeping again tonight.  So when I got home from work I brought the ladder in, climbed all the way to the top, changed the battery, climbed back down, and was greeted by, you guessed it, 'BEEP!'  I almost started crying.  Apparently, the battery wasn't sitting right.  So I went up and tried again.  Still no luck.  One more time.  Another beep.  It turns out that little cord that helps you pull the battery out was getting in the way, so I pulled it out completely, put the battery in, and, as of yet, no beeping.  Let's hope it stays that way.