Learning on the fly...and under pressure

Our smoke alarm went off tonight. I guess some olive oil dripped off the pizza I was cooking, so there was a little smoke. Not really a lot of smoke for our kitchen, but I guess fire alarms have different standards. We've never had to mess with this whole house alarm thing, so we had no idea what to do. (WIth the alarm, Donald. We knew what to do with the pizza.) But by punching keys wildly I managed to figure out a combination of keystrokes that shut it up, proving once again that dumb luck beats careful reasoning every time. (The secret is to stay away from the keys that have an obvious function, like being the 3 key.) I had to punch the new supersecret accidental code at every alarm panel, but it eventually got quiet. For 2 minutes. Then it started again. I ran around to all the keypads and entered Dad's supersecret combo of nonsense again. It stopped again. For 2 minutes. Meanwhile we had opened some windows and doors hoping to clear the air and give it no reason to squawk, but none of that seemed to be doing any good. Finally, after about five iterations, we realized we had to actually do something to make it stop for good (never let it be said that we're totally without analytic skills). Rita (yay, Mom!) remembered having seen a manual in the pile o' docs we got when we moved in, and in there was "How to turn off your fire alarm." It worked.

At least we don't have a sprinkler system.