Are you scared of smoke detectors?

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The loud sound of them frightens me. I remember when I was little and people started making stuff in the kitchen, I was often worried that the smoke detector would go off.

I'm scared of smoke detectors. I don't like the loud noise. It freaks me out.

As a child I was very scared of the fire alarm - if I knew there was going to be a fire drill, I'd sit there petrified, totally unable to focus on anything else other than that the fire alarm was going to ring soon. I still haven't completely gotten over it.

Smoke detectors, less so.

Not scared, but the loud noise hurt my ears. I still put up with them since they could save my life some day.

I ought to pull mtyself together and have one.... but I would want one with remote control or at least a line to switch it off.... I go completely desperate, when they go off.

The sound doesn't hurt my ears (in fact I've only had extremely shrill sounds hurt my ears, sounds everyone reacts to), but I would definitely get scared if it went off. I am afraid of fire and I easily panic.

Considering how easy it is to blame me for anything, I fear they’ll go off from second-hand smoke I’ve inhaled before walking there.

I'm not afraid of them but I hate them. If they did the job properly I'd like them, but they're made cheap and they err heavily on the side of going off when there's no fire. Even if you take the battery out they bleep at you to put it back. I've not noticed anybody from the industry addressing the false-alarm problem. If they can't design a more specific detector, perhaps a flashing light for 60 seconds would allow the user time to hit a button to tell it that it's not a fire might save a lot of ears. There must be better ways of alerting people to a fire than putting out a deafening, unstoppable shriek of noise. For most applications that's overkill.

It's hard to know where to draw the line with some of these modern risk-averse solutions. How much discomfort is it reasonable to suffer in the name of avoiding a very small risk of something really nasty? From the point of view of insurance companies (who drive the market for smoke alarms), our comfort isn't important.

Alarms, sirens, bells and microwave beeping all irritate and annoy me. They trigger the fight instead of flight response. I'm more apt to want to smash a smoke detector that's going off than run away from it.

Well I did accidentally set off an alarm that ended up evacuating a full and busy hotel on a Saturday night. It was in Scotland and it was bagpipe evening and the restaurant was full and on the way back to my room I was swinging my room key round my finger and it flew across the corridor, smashed the glass and off it went. The band stopped playing, the diners stopped eating, and everyone was running and rushing everywhere....and my mum was mortified whilst her boyfriend (unaware it was me) ran to save his golf clubs.

They don't bother me so much, relentless background noises like fans or the humming of photocopiers and stuff like that bother me much more.

I'm not scared of them, but they certainly aren't the most pleasant way to wake up. The smoke detector went off at 3 a.m. last week and I had a rotten headache the whole day.

I'm not scared of them, but I don't like the sound.

I've always been slightly worried about the radio active symbol that is stuck on the inside.......

At one time I was a fire warden at work and for various reasons they decided to warn me that we were having a test evacuation at some point one particular morning. Imagine knowing that the alarm is going to sound, but not ......... WHOO WHOOO WHOOO WHOO WWHHHHO when.......

I don't like being directly under one when it goes off. It makes me jump, and I dislike being startled, whether I know it's coming or not.