How dead can a battery get?

As part of my continuing hacking on my silly cell phone ring notifier

I was curious how long the batteries would last in the first box I built (4 AA duracell's in series).

Turns out it was about a month, and I just pulled them out and stuck a voltmeter on them. Three of them read about .7 or .8 volts (seems believable), but one of them read -1 volt (or maybe it was -1 millivolt and I didn't notice the scale change on the display).

Is that a normal thing to see in a really dead battery? I never expected the voltage to go negative on me. Maybe I could turn it around and make it last longer :-).

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This is not related to the dead battery but I live in Taiwan and we have the phone things you're talking about. A little cell phone cradle that lights up when your cell phone rings. Usually they are quite goofy looking like a hand or something like that. If your interested I can send you one. Raul

Actually, I have one of the lights (it is built into a pen, not in a cradle), but it lights up every time the phone is communicating with the cell tower, which as near as I can tell happens at least once an hour (no doubt the conspiracy nuts will say it is sending back all the compressed audio it has recorded during the last hour to home base in area 51).

Anyway, I'm having too much fun wasting vast quantities of time on this gadget to want a commercila solution at this point :-). Thanks for the offer though.