This morning, I woke up to a loud man’s voice.
Then I looked up and saw my hallway light was on (from under my bedroom door).
My roommate never turns on my hall light, and rarely ever even opens the door to my hallway (only if she knows I’m home and knocks first).
Of course waking up to the sound of a strange man, and the sign of someone coming into my little wing of the apartment (which never happens) my first thought was “it’s Criminal Minds, y’all!”
(I should not be allowed to watch that terrifying show. Anything anytime even mildly scary happens I’m all, “I’m about to be Criminal Minds-ed!)
I almost texted my roommate to say, “Are you okay?” “What’s up?”
But then I thought, I live in an incredibly secure building. You have to have a special fob just to get in. Then you have to swipe it again at the elevator. We have security guards – one at the desk while one does rounds. We also have surveillance cameras all over the place.
So, if I am being Criminal Minds-ed, it’s by a mastermind (or some seemingly normal but actually scary dude my roommate brought home, though at the time I did not think of that scenario).
I opened my bedroom door, peeked out the scarily open door in my small hallway, and saw…
a maintenance man working by our thermostat and whatever big thing (water heater or something?) is in that small hall closet room thing.
He’s says, “I’m sorry. I rang the bell, knocked on the door, and announced myself.” Okay, well the problem here is not that I wasn’t aware that you were in my apartment – it’s that I am aware that you’re here.
He even said, “You must’ve really been out.” It’s like “yeah, dude. Pretty sure I was in REM sleep. So, uh, leave me alone.”
I feel like I’ve said on this blog a million times that sleep is everything! I love sleep. I even have a “sleepy little girl” song that I made up, and have sang for many years to announce when I am sleepy and it is time to sleep.
(My dad still sings that song, asking if I’m a sleepy girl, sometimes when I’m getting a little cranky.)
So, my sleep is all interrupted. (The reason the maintenance man had to come into my little hallway is because that’s where the fuse box is. Apparently there was some emergency with the place below us, and he needed to come up here to fix it.)
Even though he’s the one who woke me up, I’m sort of apologetic as I’m trying to explain, “Hey, I work nights. I sleep during the day. In the future, can you please do me a favor? When you’re done with the fuse box turn off the light in my hallway and shut the door to it so the light doesn’t stream in?”
The guy’s just doing his job. It must be a pain to have some cranky sleepy tenant who’s still sleeping at noon – which I assumed it probably was…
But! As I laid down I looked at my phone. It was 6:50am(!)
No one is awake at that time! Why would the default in that situation be anything but being super quiet, efficient, and getting out of our sleepytime apartment?
Then – this is the worst part. (Preface you need to know: My roommate and I rarely ever turn on the air conditioning. (It’s bad for the environment and all that jazz (plus, I just get really cold really easily).)
On the one day someone’s messing with our thermostat area, somehow the air conditioning gets set on auto! Around 11am, it gets hot enough to set it off. The way my bed’s set up, the air blows right in my face.
Yet again, my precious, beautiful, sweet sleep is disturbed by this windy frozen tundra I’m now living in.
I walk into the living room assuming maybe there’s a heat wave and my roommate just didn’t realize I was home (’cause we do turn on the air in extreme heat). But she is nowhere to be found.
Maintenance man! (*said with the same inflection of “Newman!” in Seinfeld*)
Two(!) interrupted sleep wake-ups in one day. Now I’m cranky. Wah wah.