Gremlins

Years ago, I had a car that had gremlins running around inside it.  We'd be driving along, listening to the radio, when all of a sudden, the station would change, usually to something that made you want to drive over the edge of a cliff, like talk radio where the topic was "Foot Fungus:  Friend or Foe" or the Lawrence Welk channel with special guest Hans the goat boy and his magic accordion.

No matter what buttons or pushed, or how hard you pushed them, the station would not change until those gremlins were good and ready to change it.  Oh, and bonus!  You couldn't turn the radio off either, so there was pretty much nothing you could do but slap both hands over your ears, drive with your elbows and knees and chant, "lalalalala, I can't hear you," until the station was switched back to something resembling modern music.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the doors would randomly lock and unlock.  Running errands?  Lock.  Lost in a dicey section of town?  Unlock.  Driving down the highway?  Lock, unlock, lock, unlock.  Getting gas?  Lock.  On Tim.  While he was pumping gas.  With the keys inside.

And that was the end of that car.

Now, we apparently have some of those same gremlins running around our house.

Last week, I was watching TV as the dog snoozed behind the couch when, all of a sudden, one of the smoke detectors upstairs gave one long, loud beeeep, and one of the lights above the stairwell started flashing on and off, on and off.

Jumping up, I ran over to the stairs, only to find...nothing.  No smoke, no fire.  No reason why the lights should be flickering like in one of those horror movies where you're shouting, "Run, dummy, run!" to the ditsy girl who simply has to check it out when she knows full well that there is a revenge-seeking, mask-wearing, axe murderer on the loose and so far, nine out of her ten friends have been gruesomely killed in that same stairwell.

I turned the light off, then back on.  Still flickering, but the other light on the switch was completely dead.  I quickly checked the date.  Nope.  Not Friday the 13th.  Whew.  I pressed the switch again.  Same result.  I double checked our address.  Okay, we did not live on Elm street.  I went to the alarm panel.  No alarm had registered.  Hmmm.  Curiouser and curiouser.

Suddenly, the dog went on high alert.  Oh no, was it Freddy, Mike Meyers, Chucky or Dracula???  Nope.  It was only Tim, no axe in sight, coming home from a dinner, and Chloe happily tripped over to welcome him.

I related the bizarre incident to Tim, and he also pushed the button (both lights were now dead), checked the alarm, looked under the bed, in the closet, behind the door, and shrugged, concluding that maybe we'd had a power surge or something.  Meanwhile, I slept with one eye open that night, just in case.

Two days later, the gremlins struck again.

We had a friend over with her dog, and the three of us were laughing as we sat in the basement watching the dogs tumble around the floor.  Suddenly, the alarm went off again.  This time, it really went off, beeeeeeeppp!!!  Tim ran upstairs to disarm it while I assured our friend that it was just our friendly little gremlin and it was not really a fire...probably.  Maybe.  Hopefully.

A few minutes later, the front doorbell rang.  Assuming Tim would get it, I didn't bother to go upstairs, and kept chatting.  About five or so minutes later, Tim appeared downstairs again. 

"You really should answer the doorbell when it rings," he warned me.

"Didn't you get it?" I asked, raising a brow, because surely, he hadn't expected me to run up the stairs when he was, what, twenty feet from the door?  Who was he, Archie Bunker?

"I was at the store," he informed me.  "I went to get batteries for the smoke detector, since I thought changing the batteries might solve the problem."

Confused, I followed him up the stairs.  "Then how do you know the bell rang?  Was it you?  Did you forget your key?  Why wouldn't you call?  And anyway, you're in, so what's the big deal?"  The final words died on my lips as I saw the armed police officers standing in the kitchen.

Crap.  Had the house actually been on fire or broken into?  Did they have Chucky cuffed in the back of the cruiser?  Was Freddy's blood splattered all over my living room walls?  What had I missed???

And shouldn't the dog have heard something and  barked?  Lassie had always barked to warn Timmy just before the dope fell into the well...again.  Couldn't Chloe have at least growled, sneezed or even burped to let me know my life was about to be snuffed out?

I glanced down at the adorable muppet at my feet who was doing her doggie best to smother the officers with kisses and hugs.

"Way to go Chloe," I congratulated her.  "Next time, maybe you can lead the axe-wielding psychopath to the silver before he kills us."

The police assured me though that we actually had not been in danger.  Apparently, the alarm had  come from the "panic" button on one of the key fobs, so they had raced over, assuming the worst.

Tim had arrived back home to find lights flashing and guns drawn, and assumed the worst.

Meanwhile, our gremlin was having the last laugh, since, at the time the alarm went off, we were all downstairs and our keys were on the hall table, upstairs.  Hmmm. I wonder if we can trade in our house like we did the car?