While vacationing at a cottage on Long Lake, a faint beeping sound started. We could barely hear it, so it wasn’t a big deal. We figured it would go away. After a day or so, it got progressively faster, louder, and beepier.

Several times over the next day, we searched for the source of the annoying beeps. If you can picture a family tearing apart a cottage, that was us. We looked behind everything attached to a wall and searched through every drawer and cupboard.

As the beeps got louder we finally narrowed down a direction. The source was somewhere under the floor. I walked around the place in the morning looking for a crawl space entrance. No such luck. After a quick call to Dad I learned about a crawl space door hidden under a rug.

With a flashlight in hand, I pulled on my shoes and descending the stairs. Two steps later I found a smoke alarm with a dying battery. No more fucking beeps!