seat-safety-switch:

This is important, and it could save your life: the firefighters say that you should replace your smoke detectors every ten years. A whole-ass decade is a surprising amount of time for any electronic device these days to last, even when legislated to the nines. Although I don’t know that for sure, it probably isn’t this way out of guilt, at least.

Throwing something away after a mere ten years is antithetical to my very way of life. Every single thing has value, even when it might potentially malfunction when it comes time to keep you from dying. Even I will shoplift a new armload of the bastards (albeit wearing my most Home Depot-y shirt as I do so) and install them as need be.

Due to my hobbies and general dislike of throwing things away, I tend to have more risk of fire in my home than most. This results in a large surplus of sorta-good but untrustworthy smoke detectors, which slowly pile up in the corners of my home, unable to be banished at last to the municipal dump, who I am no longer on speaking terms with, ever since they didn’t let me take that old ceiling fan out of the junk pile. The foreman tried to taze me, even. Me, who has thought about paying taxes on at least two occasions this year. Customer service is awful these days.

What do you do with the old smoke detectors, you ask? Unfortunately, modern detectors no longer use exciting radiation sources as their emitter, so you can’t collect several thousand of them and then become the subject of a magazine article about how you got a new kind of cancer while trying to unlock the secrets of nuclear fission (it involves atoms.) That said, a “used-up” device is still an important safety device, but the kind of safety it provides has somewhat shifted. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to get the most basic ones: wheel chocks for when your parking brake (and transmission) don’t work on a hill. Imitation landmines to keep Bobby By-Law off of your property. Something to plug that open sewage pipe in the middle of what used to be the previous owner’s bathroom, so you stop falling in when you get up in the middle of the night to check if the power company has finally cut you off.

I’m sure there are hundreds of other ideas, but I only have like two working smoke detectors, and – due to the intransigence of the aforementioned power company – they’re both currently powered by a gas generator that I have welded onto the trunk of my Plymouth. It takes awhile to pile them up if I can only replace them every ten years. Maybe those eggheads in the government should consider cutting it to five years, give me some real inventory to work with. Hell, I bet if I had enough of these, I could use them as a tazer shield.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”it involves atoms”) #storytime #unreality cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once