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I tiptoes down, checked all the rooms, and found the noise was emanating from the hallway. There on the wall was a Honeywell thermostat. As I stared at it, it made the chirping sound again, a high-pitched peep lasting only an instant.
It concerned me. We've just moved into an old St. Paul house after a lifetime of forced air heat, and we aren't altogether sure how the boiler, and its insidious necklace of pipes and radiators, work. There's always the possibility that the house will explode and you will be sitting in the snow, covered with rusty drizzle. Down in the basement, the boiler seemed to be behaving about right -- it was boiling. So what was the problem?
I found the documentation for the thermostat. The troubleshooting page said nothing about chirps, but offered a great schematic showing how easy it was to replace the battery, first snipping the red wire, then the blue, then grafting a fresh battery onto the old wire. I wouldn't do that in two thousand years.
The sun having risen, I called around to some heating contractors. "Your thermostat is chirping? Nah, that's a new one," one man told me. "I'll bet you need to replace your battery," another guy said.
I decided to get Honeywell to advise me, before the house blew. I logged onto Netscape, did a Yahoo search for Honeywell, and surfed right up to the virtual atrium of the company. But when I clicked the Honeywell hotlink button, nothing happened. The Universal Resource Locator (URL) had either expired, or Honeywell was being deluged by hordes of homeowners, demanding to know why their thermostats were chirping.
Playing a hunch, I consulted with an analog medium -- the St. Paul US West White Pages. There was the phone number for Honeywell's National Customer Assistance Center, 1-800-328-3111. I dialed.
"Welcome to Chemical Bank's 24 hour customer service center," a recording said. I hung up and dialed again. "Welcome to Chemical Bank's --" it repeated. A human operator came on. I said I was confused, because the Honeywell customer hotline number was connecting me to a bank that wanted to sell me an ARM for a leg.
She asked me what number I had dialed. It made no sense to her -- the number was nothing like the number she was using. I was about to apologize for calling with such a confusing problem when she, like an angel, suggested that she ask her supervisor what to do. So I sat at my desk for a few moments, and the thermostat chirped twice, before she came back to the phone.
"Sir, my shift supervisor instructs me that even though you were trying to call Honeywell, you did in fact call Chemical Bank, which makes you our customer, so we're going to help you. She is going to call BellAtlantic and inquire why that number is being routed to our phone banks. Meanwhile, her supervisor is dialing Honeywell's corporate information line to discover the real thermostat hotline number."
I thanked her and Chemical Bank, which until this moment had never offered much of a human face to me, but if they could save me and my family from a scalding midwinter explosion, I would definitely look into that ARM.
I pictured the conversations lighting up the corporate PBXes. "Hello, this is BellAtlantic. May I help you?" "Good morning, you have reached Honeywell's corporate offices. How may I direct your call?" In a way it was curiously allegorical, the good forces of technology and their valiant ethic of customer service arrayed against the evil forces of technology with their house-blasting chirping thermostats. I was getting to the bottom of things.
A few chirps later the supervisor came on the line. "Mr. Finley, I have some good news and some bad news. The Honeywell customer assistance number is 1-800-468-1502, and they are open from Monday through Friday from 7:00 to 5:30 PM, Central.
"The problem is, their lines are overloaded, because of the weather. The best time to call would be perhaps tomorrow, at 7 o'clock exactly. Which was fifteen minutes ago."
I thanked Chemical Bank profusely, then tried futilely to dial Honeywell -- busy signals. I kept calling at ten-minute intervals. If I could just get in the queue, and then hold on for fifty minutes or so until it was my turn, maybe my family could be spared from its certain rendezvous with fire and ice.
But I couldn't get through. We were living in a chirping time bomb. Even if the bomb didn't explode, the chirping alone would drive us to the brink.
And so I found myself in the hallway again, tapping on the thermostat, and wondering to myself: why on earth would a thermostat have a speaker? And that was when I lifted my eyes. Panning slowly up above the thermostat they went, till they spied, way up high, right where the wall meets the ceiling, a smoke detector. The battery kind.
I got on a kitchen chair, opened the little plastic lid, and took out the 9 volt battery, and tested it. It had reached the point of intermittent charge. So -- it chirped.
I changed the battery, unhooked the phone, and lay down to nap, like a man who had never done one wrong thing.