Salon post:February 8

[jenett]

Good morning!

Topic of the week
The cat woke me up at 3am (she locked herself in the bathroom, and spent some period of time jiggling the door until I realised that it was not just her having a fixation on the closet door like she does sometimes...) And then she stepped on the power strip for most of the things in the bedroom and turned it off.

So. How do you get through the day when you have that kind of disruption? Or do you have stories of epic "Wait, what happened here?" in the middle of the night you want to share?

What I've been up to
Lots of trying to get things done for a project at work, and getting ready to be on vacation next week. (I'm staying home and doing all the things I was going to do in December before December turned into moving.)


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Comments

[davidgillon]

Mostly I just end up with a randomly moving 'part of the day where I'm awake'. Admittedly this wouldn't work if I was still working, but we used to joke my boss was regularly in work before I was asleep (and the joke was it was true, she got in ridiculously early).

I recently decided one of the fundamental laws of nature is 'The low battery warning on your smoke alarm will only ever occur while you're asleep and it's the middle of the night'.

[cjsmith]

OH GOD YES THE SMOKE ALARM. I had one memorable night when I was up at 3 removing every one of them from the house (and burying the units under heaps of laundry in the garage) because they were all connected together into some uber-futuristic system and nothing I could do would shut them up. This involved extension ladders due to the really high ceilings and the staircase. Naturally I had midterms the next day.

[davidgillon]

I think it's a measure of how tired I am right now that I've been trying for a week to think of a way to put the new battery in the smoke alarm (old one popped out at 4AM with the help of a ruler) without having to fetch a chair from downstairs. Your post just reminded me there's a step ladder literally the other side of the door from it.

[cjsmith]

Oh maaaan. I know that kind of tired. You have my sympathies.

We used to swap “tiredness stories” in school. Like: I have lived in this town for 7 years and last night I needed Siri to get home. Like: I just washed my face with toothpaste and didn’t notice until I tried to figure out that minty freshness. Like: I laid out my clothing for tomorrow and brushed my teeth and then since it was dark out and I was exhausted and my clothes were ready I automatically got dressed and went downstairs to get to school, except I forgot the part about sleeping in between.

Yeah. Anyway. Good luck with the smoke detector and the ladder, and may you catch up on sleep soon!

[davidgillon]

My version of that is standing outside, ready to lock the front door thinking "I know I've forgotten something", and then realising it's my crutches. Not getting far without those!

[cjsmith]

Whoah, right!

[wohali]

A building I lived in, in the late 90s, had a new-fangled building wide smoke alarm that played EXTREMELY loud alerts, flashed beacons in every room, and played a LOUD PRERECORDED ANNOUNCEMENT that directed you to the exits.

Apparently the tenants knew about this and had learned to ignore it.

I hadn't. I had just moved in. I had just gotten a new cat who wasn't yet used to me. And of course it went off at 4AM.

Imagine me, heart pounding and life flashing before my eyes, with an unruly orange-stripey tom cat, hustling down 7 flights of stairs in my pyjamas, out into the cold Massachusetts winter air to put kitty in the car...only to find a handful of tenants in the lobby complaining that "someone must have been smoking in their apartment again."

GRRRRRRR.

I was a complete wreck the next day.

[cjsmith]

Whoah. That’s extreme. :/ I’m glad you kept the cat safe and didn’t lose him in the rush!

I’m reminded of a ... year? Period of time... when my partner and I seemed to have been jinxed with respect to fire alarms. In hotels. Maryland, for an event: four hours out on the lawn with the rest of the occupants. Hamburg, airport hotel, in the shower and not yet packed: we knew we would never get our belongings and make our flight if we did what we were supposed to, so we packed as fast as I’ve ever seen it done and ran. Oslo, desperate to find a place to stay and more desperate to find a restroom: the first place we saw was actually ALREADY on fire so we drove along to the next one...

[redbird]

The place I lived in Seattle had loud alarms, with strobes, in every room, so there was no way I was staying in the apartment, or even the lobby, when they went off. There was a supermarket, with a Starbucks counter, in the building, and at least once I fled my apartment because they'd burned the coffee.

There was also one actual fire (which turned out to be set by someone trying to cover up evidence of a crime), which was also a reminder that even if I could have tolerated the noise, it was a good idea to get out when those went off.

[jazzyjj]

That definitely seems to ring true here in my building, no pun intended. Although, they've also been known to go off during the day. I have one in the bedroom and in here that both talk in addition to chirping. But luckily mine haven't gone off for a good while now.

[madgastronomer]

My wife and I both do the same when left to our own devices, re: sleep period. We have delayed phase sleep disorder. If you haven't already, you might consider being evaluated for this.

[davidgillon]

Interesting, a quick glance at the wiki page seems awfully familiar.

[hrafn]

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to track down a low-battery-altering smoke detector one night in my last apartment. It wasn't the device in my living room, but I could NOT figure out where the sound was even coming from. I tried to just go to sleep and ignore it but when I laid down, then it sounded like the BEEP was inside the wall right next to my head.

I can't recall now if it turned out to be one of the two alarms in the common stairwell (which needed new batteries at various times) OR the surprise! second alarm in MY apartment (mounted high on the wall in my little entry hallway, next to the doorbell box and some other mysterious plastic box).

[cjsmith]

I almost never don’t have that kind of disruption. A really good night, for me, involves any more than four hours of sleep. I get those once a week if I’m lucky. Three is more usual.

My epic disruptions lately involve suddenly having to strip the bed and scrub, hydrogen-peroxide-treat, and wash all the bedding. I’m on day twenty-one of this at the moment. Three hours is about as long as I can go with a tampon, a pad, and a folded up black towel under me, before I either have to wake up and change all that out OR I sleep ten minutes too long and as punishment for that I get the epic laundry. I just adore being female. Adore it. *barf*

I wish I knew how people survive like this. I do not have flex time at my job. I do not have sick days. And if I make mistakes at work, lives are lost. I need some ironclad coping skills.

It’s time for me to foster some more orphan kittens. I used to wake up every two hours for those. The really young ones need the bottle that often. It would be a good use of my already wacky sleep situation!

[davidgillon]

I do not have flex time at my job. I do not have sick days. And if I make mistakes at work, lives are lost. I need some ironclad coping skills.

That's why I was so glad all our work went through multiple levels of checking.

[cjsmith]

Amen. It’s the only way things go as well as they do!

[pameladean]

Oh, ugh, I went through that for several years and it is so awful.

Much later I talked to several women who had similar experiences and one of them said that she had just used adult diapers so she could sleep at all; she also travelled for her work and wore diapers on the airplane so she wouldn't bleed through onto the seat. I have not tried this and I imagine that it has its drawbacks, price perhaps being not the least of them; but offer it for what it may be worth.

I was working at home and could adjust to some extent, but I had almost no social life for a while because I was so sleep deprived I just could not cope.

P.

[cjsmith]

That’s an idea I hadn’t yet considered. Thank you. (Also those adult-incontinence-bed-protector thingies. I have several, under the cats’ boxes at the moment, and they’re washable.)

[pameladean]

Oh, I wish I'd thought of the bed-protector things. My sheets from that time of my life have never ever been the same.

P.

[madgastronomer]

I woke up to my wife saying the toilet was clogged and the bowl wouldn't stop filling and it had already overflowed and been dripping through the floor into the living room. So that was exciting.

[cjsmith]

Oh that's... suboptimal!

[madgastronomer]

It really was. But since I was probably only going to spend about 3 hours at work before the snow started and I needed to get home before my street got too bad... it gave me an excuse to call a mulligan, call in with a plumbing disaster, and go back to bed.

And right on time, the snow did in fact start.

[cjsmith]

Oh man. Wow. :(

[davidgillon]

My toilet cistern used to have fibre-composite washers on the ball-cock. These have a life of about 3 to 5 years. Inevitably they would fail in the middle of the night, resulting in a loud hissing as water squirted into the cistern through the hole in the washer, and leaving the overflow running constantly. This isn't helped if the isolation valve for the inlet pipe doesn't work very well, or at all.

It was such a relief when I was able to replace them with plastic washers. The label on the new ball-cock mechanism actually bragged 'no more composite washers'!

[eclips1st]

Not epic... our fire alarm sometimes goes off, randomly, in the middle of the night... which means it rings on all 3 floors (1st, 2nd, basement) which results in one of us running to the 1st floor to check if something's up, and the other calling my parents in the basement (intergenerational house) to ask if it's them.

Ugh.

Somewhat epic: me, 36 weeks pregnant, waking up at 3 am because there's light downstairs... go downstairs to find all the lights on and my mom moping the floor... hubby had left the tap on, the sink overflowed, water got into the floor and was dripping into my mom's ceiling and it was raining in my parents' kitchen. Cost us 18k to fix.
I couldn't go to my parents' place for weeks because it gave me anxiety and contractions.
This was the night before the 1st day of the term. So the next day, I went to work utterly exhausted, contracting irregularly.
(I don't think I was able to go back to sleep.)

[finch]

I actually normally wake up at least once or twice during the night and have always been pretty epic at going back to sleep if I have a chance so it's not too much of a disruption. That's why I'm the parent who gets up with our kid on early mornings, because she can need me to change a show or provide food or help with something every twenty minutes and I'll still consider it "sleeping".

[pameladean]

Oh dear, not at all what you want on a work night.

We've had rounds of "take one of the cats to the emergency vet at one a.m." over the years, plus dreadful repetitions of "toilet clogs up late at night, call plumber and agree they can come out at eight in the morning, then spend such of the night as is left trudging up and down the stairs to the first-floor toilet."

P.

[wohali]

My worst was when I used to run the support team for a small company that made wireless internet devices (just before WiMax became a thing). Our biggest customers were 12 time zones away from us.

Of course, this meant that they'd call with URGENT ISSUES every day around 3AM my time. (Sometimes, they were even actual urgent issues.)

It got really bad, and my health suffered for years. I have definite PTSD from the sound of the Blackberry's vibrator against wood. To this day I won't carry a phone or pager with an active vibration function.

[davidgillon]

There were a couple of years where I was on call to fix overnight software builds, which took about 14 hours to run, and which we were doing daily during flight trials of the 777. So I'd kick them off just before I went home here in the UK, and my colleague in Seattle would keep an eye on it and page me if the process fell over and he couldn't fix it from there.

My mistake was never actually checking what the pager sounded like, so one Saturday morning I wake up to a beeping that's gradually getting louder. "Weird," I think, "must be a lorry with a wide load coming up the hill", roll over and go back to sleep. A couple of hours later I get a phone call from a slightly irate project manager asking if I'm coming in or not. Whoops.

[jazzyjj]

I have something that happened not long after I moved out of my parents' house and into this apartment complex. I was woken at about 2 in the morning by loud banging at my window. I didn't really think much about it and went back to sleep. That morning when my roommate and I were in the kitchen having breakfast and tidying things up, he informed me that the vacuum store next door had been broken into. So that was the loud banging I heard. One of the neighbor boys upstairs acted quickly though and called the cops. That evening at the weekly apartment meeting we were all told what had occurred, and that security measures were being instituted. Pretty freaky though.





This week my neighbor across the hall and I have been planning our cooking startup. Today we met with the activities director here and another staff member to bring them up to speed. This other staff member kinda knew where things were going, because he tutors my neighbor. But the activities director was also very supportive of our plan, and asked us to follow up with him in the next few weeks. The only problem here is that they are using G-Suite for most if not all of the written documentation, and I've never used it. So my neighbor sent me some of the documentation just to look over. At first it wasn't reading properly on my Mac with Apple's on-board screen reader, nor could I edit it which is part of what this neighbor wants me to do. But after some tweaking and signing up for gmail one of my tutors and I finally got it working. It turns out that it works very well with the screen readers on here. But there's also a book about G-suite and screen reader access that I'm getting. So I'm confident things will work out in our favor with that, and my neighbor and I are happy with the way the meeting went today.

[solitarywalker]

There was one night when i awoke suddenly to a loud crash. My cat had jumped onto the chest of drawers and then leaned against the floor lamp beside it, knocking it over; the impact with the floor shattered the frosted glass shade and of course terrified the cat. i cleaned up the glass right away, i don't remember whether i went back to bed.

[silveradept]

Most of middle of the night stories involve a pet, and often my current cat, either deciding to pick a fight with someone which results in LOUD DOOR RATTLING, or deciding the human is a snuggly creature and bouncing all over the sleeping me until she settles in.

Thankfully, getting back to sleep after the disturbance is relatively easy for me.