I was a teenager at the time and my family burned logs to keep the house warm in winter. My Dad upgraded the smoke detectors so that they were all linked. In other words, if one alarm went off in the basement (where the wood burner was) then every detector in the house would go off.

This sounds great in theory, but in reality it turns out that the detectors would go off on a near weekly basis. Whenever someone tossed logs in the burner and smoke escaped. We got desensitized to the beeping and it became second nature to just cancel the alarm when it happened.

Fast forward to the closed beta for Guild Wars 2 and I was up late, trying to play every possible minute that I could before the weekend was over. My door was closed, headphones on, and I was REALLY immersed.

The smoke detector started beeping. And it kept beeping over and over and over. Normally, at this point my parents would've cancelled it. That kind of struck me as odd, so I opened my door.

Ruh roah, raggy.

A wall of smoke was on the other side of the door. And the smell was NOTHING like the usual wood burner smell. It really hurt to breathe and my eyes were not having a good time either.

After shaking my Dad awake, we called the fire department, got all the animals out, and nobody got hurt. The damage was serious, but the entire house didn't go up. The upstairs needed rebuilt and there was a fair bit of smoke damage.

I don't want to think about what would've happened if I wasn't up playing that closed beta 😅