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.)


Useful notes
Consider tracking this post to get notifications of new comments. Select the bell icon (or the words 'track this'). More help over here, and more about notifications in general here.

Comments are welcome whenever you get a chance - even if that's hours or days later. Feel free to jump into whatever sub-threads intrigue you. More discussion is the point of the salon posts!

Got a question you're trying to sort out, or a thing you'd like to discuss? Lots of thoughtful interesting people with a wide range of interests show up here! Feel free to ask about things you're thinking about or trying to solve, as well as other kinds of chat.

House rules:
This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.

1) Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to. Keeping conversations SFW is appreciated.

2) If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

3) If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[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.