Rude Awakening

So last night I went to bed at a normal time and was so tired after my busy day that I thought this will be the night where I get back to "normal." At 2:45am our obnoxious, deafeningly loud smoke detector goes off!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All I can think is "ohmygosh, I caught the house on fire!!!" Let me back up, we did our first loads of laundry yesterday, the way it works here is you have a "dry cycle" that comes on when the wash is done but it doesn't dry your clothes per se (why would it really, its only a DRY cycle?!) anyway, it makes it so the clothes aren't TOTALLY wet but they are still damp and in need of drying. Anyway, what people do over here is lay their clothes around the house and on top of the radiators. I asked if it was okay to put clothes directly ON the radiator and I was told that yes, that is what everyone does, they were made for that, its fine, clothes won't get scorched and they will be dry when you get up -fine. So, last night when I'm awoken from my deep, perfect slumber to the smoke detector that is my first thought, I've started a fire with my first load of laundry!! I JUMP out of bed and run into the hall, lift up the clothes and there is nothing that is even warm!!! I go grab a chair and stand on it and can't open the detector to save my life!! I go grab some scissors to pry it open (and am making NO progress other than starting to damage the casing), Adam is yelling at me (or maybe it just seemed like yelling since we were both delirious) to stop doing that as he's running around getting dressed in case someone comes over. And then after 5 minutes of deafening noise and us not at all being able to tell why its going off, it just stopped. As suddenly as it started it just stopped! Thankfully B didn't wake up (I honestly have no idea how she slept thru that) and I laid in bed for the next 2 hours listening to loud (likely intoxicated) Irishmen come home and not being able to fall back asleep. Sigh...so what would have been my perfect nights sleep was totally ruined and I still have not a clue why. I hate smoke detectors, until they save my life or the life of someone I love -I hate them.