DST, Smoke Detectors and Vigilance

    The message is still to change the batteries in your smoke detectors when you set your clocks in accordance with daylight saving time. I have 3 Smoke/ Co2 detectors in my house now, but they no longer have batteries. They are sealed units which are to be discarded when they expend their lifetimes, about 10 years they say.
   But there was a time when all smoke detectors functioned on batteries. One such time was when our kids were college age. When M. began her junior year or maybe when she was a senior, she decided to abandon dorm life to live in an apartment house with 6 female roommates. It was a large two-story house owned and rented out by a college professor.  Being crafty, he rented it as a family residence, so avoiding certain safety regulations, such as emergency exits and such.
   I remember the day she left our house, excited to be living on her own, so to speak. Dave had borrowed one of his uncle's Colony Liquor box trucks and she took with her everything she owned---clothes for all seasons, what was then considered electronics, books, everything. My last memory of that trip is her saying good-bye holding her big old Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animal in her arms.
   The trip out was uneventful. But one seemingly minor event almost certainly affected what was to occur just about a week later: 
         Everything was unloaded from the truck and put in place, carried upstairs because that's where all the individual bedrooms were when the landlord remodeled the old house into lodging for a "family" of 6 college students. The walls had been freshly painted shortly before, which was another factor in what was to ensue.
       As Dave was leaving the house for the ride home, he passed through the downstairs area and happened to notice a problem with  the one and only smoke detector. The cover was dangling open and the batteries were gone---no doubt "borrowed" for someone's radio or other device. Dave told me later he first laid  a ten-dollar bill on the kitchen table with instructions for one of them to go to the store and get batteries. Then he had the thought that with all the excitement that no one would go. So Dave actually drove the truck to the store and got the batteries, and returned to the house and installed them himself. And thereby hangs the tale.