A few days ago, I heard a small chirping sound, coming from the back of our apartment. My first thought was that one of our smoke detectors needed a new battery. That’s the sound we’re getting. So we checked all of the smoke detectors and found nothing. Yet the chirping persisted. In fact, after searching the apartment for where the sound was coming from, looking everywhere for some battery-operated toy or anything that might be causing this sound (and, of course, this was all about midnight the other day), I found nothing. And you can hear this small sound almost everywhere in the apartment! Grrr… I did discover that the chirp sounds every 40 seconds. You can  imagine how annoying this is, especially for someone who works at home, doing quiet work such as writing! Double grrrr…

Last night we continued the search, taking out the can in one of the recessed lights in the hallway and taking the vent off one of the air conditioning ducts, and we’ve concluded that the chirping might be coming from an old smoke detector that was left on the previous ceiling (inside our ceiling) when we put in central air. Putting in the central air required lowering the ceiling in the hallway. Then we went online to see whether there was any info about others with such a situation. We did find cases, nothing identical to ours, and all of them were in far newer homes with more wired technology. There was even one family that has a chirping sound in their finished basement that has been going now for four years! (They don’t hear it in the rest of the house.)

How to solve this problem? What are possible solutions? We did find the suggestion to use a stethoscope to locate the source of the sound. But once that’s done, do we tear open the ceiling? Do we wait for the battery to die completely? If so, how long will that take? Help! I was thinking that perhaps there’s a short story in this: characters all go slowly mad because of small, persistent chirping sound.