It was almost midnight when my husband decided the blinking device on the wall had to be a camera.
We’d read too many horror stories about hidden recording devices, so in a moment of shared paranoia, he covered it with a towel. We went to sleep feeling oddly proud of our “security awareness.” Two hours later, the bedroom door burst open with a crash that could’ve woken the dead. The Airbnb owner—red-faced, panting, wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt that made the moment even more surreal—stood in the doorway shouting, “You idiots, this is a FIRE ALARM!” My husband and I sat up, blinking like confused owls, completely unprepared for the disaster we’d caused.
When the owner marched over and yanked off the towel, the embarrassment hit us like a wave. There it was—not a camera, not even remotely suspicious—just a standard white smoke detector blinking gently like any normal safety device. “Why would I want to watch you sleep?” he demanded, genuinely baffled by our imagination. My husband weakly pointed out that the blinking seemed suspicious. The owner stared at him, incredulous. “It blinks because it’s working. You know what would be suspicious? If it DIDN’T blink.” As painful as it was, he had a point. The silence that followed was the heavy, mortifying kind you feel in your bones.
He went on to explain that covering a smoke alarm triggers an emergency alert in the security system, which had called him at 2 a.m. and dragged him out of bed to “rescue two grown adults from suffocating themselves.” At that, we both shrank into the mattress, drowning in embarrassment. We apologized repeatedly, trying to explain that we’d only acted out of caution, but even hearing our own excuses made us cringe. The owner eventually sighed, rubbed his temples, and muttered something about people “watching too many conspiracy videos,” before finally leaving to reclaim whatever was left of his sleep.
After he left, my husband and I sat in the dim room staring at the very functional, very innocent smoke detector blinking proudly above us. It took exactly thirty seconds before he whispered, “So … should we mention this in the review?” I hit him with a pillow. Hard. In the end, we left the owner a heartfelt apology and learned a valuable lesson: sometimes paranoia makes fools out of absolutely everyone. If a device is blinking, it’s probably just doing its job—and sometimes the only thing hiding in your Airbnb is your own overactive imagination.