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).