It’s one of the first signs that you’ve truly hit adulthood. You’re lightly sleeping in the dead of night, dreaming about owning an Ikea SÖDERHAMN sofa when suddenly…
*Chirp.*
Oh no. You glance at your clock. 3:12 a.m. Maybe it was a one-off thing. 15 seconds have passed; it was just a fluke, right?
*Chirp.*
Fuck. The smoke detector won’t stop, and dad isn’t around to spring to action and whip out a 9V battery to swap in. Hell, you don’t even own a 9V battery.
*Chirp.*
Does that little button on the smoke detector even fucking do anything? You’re jamming it, and it’s just making an unrelated beeping sound. Quite literally no one on planet Earth knows what that button does. Who designed this piece of shit? Is it even necessary? Maybe it would be better if we all just died in our sleep than deal with this mental torture.
Smoke detector technology has remained relatively unchanged for decades. What I’m proposing is a new, more peaceful smoke detector. The device will have a light sensor, so no low-battery notifications will go off in the dead of night. Hooray! You can get around to replacing that backup battery when you’re conscious and alert in the afternoon, between the hours of 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. Our device will never remind you outside of this window.
But why stop there? If we exceed our initial seed funding, we will add other sweet additional features, such as:
1. Our new, chill smoke detector will feature a volume knob. Do smoke alarms really need to be so loud? Come on. I’m pretty sure it would still wake me up at half volume, and I wouldn’t risk embarrassing myself by waking up my neighbors if I left the oven on overnight. It’s time for the user to decide.
2. Do Not Disturb mode. Some nights, you just really need to sleep. Big presentation at work the next day. Recovering from coronavirus. Whatever the reason, you want to sleep soundly knowing that you won’t be disturbed. You will be able to program “quiet hours” into this smoke alarm for true, disturbance-free sleep.
3. A carbon monoxide detector with all of the above features.
UPDATE: The USFA has shut down this JumpKick campaign.