Frustrating, too, that the jolly things are prone to beep in the middle of the night rather than during the day when the battery goes flat. So that's when we leap out of bed, whip out the battery and leave it in a state of uselessness for months. But that's no excuse.
The occupants of the And Another Thing premises are by no means proud to admit that their fire alarms have been rendered inoperable for this reason.
Once again - that's no excuse.
Fresh batteries have now been installed and we're all set to go. Best that you check yours - now.
• We hear that cellphone discoveries in some of our prisons have gone up dramatically in the past year, as inmates continue to carry out their criminal activities from inside.
You would think that the cell phone jamming technology introduced by Corrections would have taken care of the problem, but not so. Where there's a will there'll always be a way, but you'd think a cursory sweep of a metal detector would reveal any untoward concealed metallic objects - and surely the old trick of hiding a file inside a cake delivered as a gift from outside would have certainly done its dash.
Most phones are smuggled into prisons "internally" with one recent case where a Christchurch prisoner was found to have not one, but two phones internally concealed - and it doesn't take much imagination to guess exactly where on the body that would be.
For most, that would be an agonising experience, whether the phone be in a fully charged state or not. Body cavity concealment is a risky practice to say the least. Bottom line - inmates will surely be pushing things way too far past the limit, with the newly released bread board-sized iPhone 6 stuck up certain places.
• And while on the subject of squeezing stuff into impossibly small places, silicon chip technology has allowed digital storage capacity to increase dramatically, by would you believe, 1000-fold in just 10 years.
Memory giant SanDisk has somehow managed to pack 512 gigabytes (not megabytes) of information into a tiny SD card - the one that you slot into your point and shoot camera. At about NZ$1000, it sounds a tad expensive for a postage stamp sized wafer, but when you think that equates to around 30 hours of HD video, it is mere pennies.
Think back to what you had to fork out in 2004 for a 512-megabyte (MB) SD card with 1000th of the space.
Most will remember even further back to the 3 inch floppy disc that would hold around a dozen low-res images. Storing your digital "stuff" has never been cheaper. A fitting time to sing the praises of the silicon chip, to the tune of Memories Are Made of This.
• Brian Holden has lived in Rotorua for most of his life and has recently celebrated 10 years' writing And Another Thing.
