Your email won’t wake me up!
I once heard a professor say this to a struggling student in one of my classes a few years ago. It was “Coding 1”, which was basic html and css. I already had quite a bit of experience coding web pages with basic html and css, so I was kind of coasting along. Other people were struggling though, and one young woman had confided in the teacher that she didn’t like to email him late at night because she was afraid she would bother him. This was long enough ago that most people were still using big desktop computers and I don’t know about you but I didn’t normally lug my computer to bed with me in those days. Our professor would’ve had to sleep in the same room as his computer, leave it on all night, and configure whatever email program he was using to bleep (or whatever) whenever a new message came in.
Fast forward a few years… I keep my iPhone next to my bed every night. I don’t normally leave the sound on but I do sometimes use it as an alarm clock and when people are traveling somewhere, they text me when they arrive, so I leave the sound on for that. Then there was last night. I had a totally bizarre dream. I was attending a wedding. At the Doelle house. At 2:30 AM. If you follow The Marquis’s blog, you may recognize the Doelle house from his latest three-minute story. It is pronounced “Doley” and it’s an old lighthouse-keeper’s house at the end of the moominbeach. Until a couple years ago, there was no road access to it and, when we were kids, we used to pretend that it was haunted. One of the many weird features of my dream, other than all of the dead people who made an appearance (we won’t go there), was that a bunch of Hari Krishna folks were milling around down on the beach asking for money (actually it was more complicated than that but I couldn’t explain it if I tried).
This dream was soooooo weird that I woke up, grabbed my iPhone and Twittered it. Yes. I really did that. Tweeting at 0-batscope-30 did not wake up the GG because his phone doesn’t bleep when somebody twitters and I had turned off my phone’s sound so he wouldn’t hear the key-click. But it did wake up at least one other person. I’m not going to say who. Guess if you want. I will say that, if y’all are gonna sleep with yer phones, make sure you have Twitter notifications turned off because you never know who might wake you up!
September 28th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
I finally figured out how to use my phone as an alarm clock–very awesome. I only do so to avoid changing the alarm time on my two actual clocks; it’s a pain. I dreamed vividly last night too, probably because of our horrible muggy weather. I’m blaming any crabbiness on it also. 😉
September 29th, 2010 at 7:03 am
Hari Krishna’s on the beach. that’s funny – like we ever have any money while walking the beach!
September 29th, 2010 at 7:47 am
Yeah, money? What money? I think the krishnas had some kind of weird arrangement with the wedding folk.
Tangentially, I do always carry my phone on the beach now. Partly because it’s so handy as a camera/video cam. And partly because, if I’m all the way down at Doelle’s and an upbound sailing ship (or whatever) suddenly appears, I can *call* somebody to tell them, instead of running like a bat outta hell all the way down the beach. (Yes, life is exciting at the beach.)