What little, annoying thing is it that really gets to you?

For instance, there is a knocking sound in the passenger door of my wife's car. It drives me nuts every time I ride in her car.

"How do you stand that noise?" I ask.

"Oh, I've gotten used to it, It doesn't bother me a bit. In fact, I don't even hear it anymore," she replies.

I guess if you're around some annoying something long enough, you can learn how to tune it out.

Maybe you can.

Not me.

The knock in the car door just gets louder and louder.

I've been tempted to stop the car on the side of the road, take the door panel off and put an end to the knocking. But I've restrained myself by doing the only thing I know how when some car noise is slowly driving me NUTS!

I turn the radio up. Way up. Loud enough to drown out any other sounds in the car. It works, but there are a couple of drawbacks.

One, I have a headache when I get to my destination.

Two, any type of conversation with others in the car is out of the question.

Understanding how I react to repetitious little noises you can imagine what a chirping smoke alarm does to me. You know the sound when the battery is going dead: chirp.....chirp....chirp....chirp....chirp. It's maddening. Way worse than the knocking in a car door. Way worse, I tell you.

The fix is relatively simple in most cases. Change the battery. But what happens when there are about eight smoke alarms in the house? Change all of the batteries, right? Right. But what happens when that doesn't stop the incessant chirping?

If it sounds like I' m speaking from experience, I am. This happened at my Mom and Dad's house several years ago. They had been living in West Columbia and coming back to their home here every month or so. I'd check on the house while they were gone to make sure everything was OK.

On one of my checks prior to their coming home, I heard the chirping. I wasn't there but a few minutes, but that was enough. I knew the sound would drive my parents crazy so I tried changing the batteries. That didn't stop the noise so I got an electrician to check it out since they were all tied in to the electrical system. He couldn't figure it out before the weekend when they were to arrive.

I went by to see them about an hour after they got home and apologized about the chirping.

"What noise," they both said.

I could hear it chirping about every three minutes: CHIRP...CHIRP...CHIRP.

"Y'all can't hear that?"

"Hear what?"

I got it fixed after they left simply because I couldn't stand it for the few minutes I spent there every week checking the house.

So you can imagine how I reacted when I heard the chirping in my own home a few days ago. My smoke alarms are not wired in and I only have a couple so it was easy to figure out it wasn't them. The problem, I determined, had to be in the new burglar/fire alarm system we had just installed.

There were sensors and gizmos in every room. The chirping had to be coming from one of them.

But I could not for the life of me figure which one. I enlisted the help of my family. They weren't much help.

You could stand in one area and the sound was coming from over there.

Go over there and the sound was coming from where you just came from.

I started complaining loudly about that #@$% system and how I never wanted it in the first place. On and on and on I went.

"If they can't get it fixed and fixed right, tell them to come take it out and refund my money," I told her to tell them.

When my wife finally called the alarm system company to come check it out (she initiated this deal, so she had to handle all problems), the technician politely walked around the house after informing her that the chirping was not coming from anything he had installed.

She, he and bonus son stood in opposite locations of the living room trying to triangulate the location of the chirping.

After several minutes and several false leads, they narrowed it down to a box behind the sofa.

Seems my wife had forgotten about the extra smoke alarms she bought to install in our house about a year ago.

Cody Sossamon (cody@gaffneyledger.com) is publisher of The Gaffney Ledger.