I heard a chirp.

But I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. 

And the chirps were so widely spaced, trying to figure out which of the friggin’ smoke detectors it was coming from was an exercise in frustration. I took one after another off the wall and removed the batteries. (Why can’t the battery cases open more easily?)

Long story short: I took down all the detectors and set about recharging the batteries. No, I still don’t know which one was chirping.

Anyway, batteries recharged, now it was time to put them back in.

And here’s the thing: after putting the batteries back in, none of the forking detectors showed any signs of life. Pressing the test button did nothing. Did I have the batteries in correctly?

I checked again. The left one had the negative end pointing out and the right one had the positive end pointing out. Correct?

But with the recharged batteries, none of the detectors seemed to work.

And then I looked a bit closer:

I forking hate smoke detectors! Can’t anybody make a decent one?