The Calls

I was rudely awaken by a phone call just after 4 this morning and was not at all pleased when I saw the name on the screen. I rejected the call but no sooner had I put the phone down when it rang again. I furiously pressed the busy button and then silenced it. No good as I could still hear it when it vibrated on the next call a minute later. A few minutes later, I could hear the phone vibrated again to indicate an incoming message. Bloody hell.

What was so important that it couldn’t wait until a more civilised hour in the morning? True, I had asked a friend, R, to ask a favour from his friend, A, a Malaysian working in the US but surely he can still remember the time difference??

I’m the type who finds it next to impossible to sleep again after having waken up in the middle of the night and this morning was no exception. So I trudged to work, yawning occasionally and nursing the beginnings of a headache, feeling annoyed and resentful. And I had a two-hour meeting in the morning.

The last time someone attempted to call me after 11 pm (I deem uncivilised calling hours as between 11 pm to 6 am) was Akak who wanted to inform that Big Brother had passed. It so happened that I switched the phone to silent the night before as I had wanted to get up for Arsenal’s Champions League match. But even if I had not turned it off and I woke up to answer the call, really, what difference would it make? The burial proceedings would only begin the next day and there was nothing anyone else or I could do, save recite Yassin for him. The dead has died but why deprive the living of sleep? The living who had to rise the following morning and begin their days anew and who had to deal with the burial ceremony. A call in those uncivilised hours would only be tolerable if someone is in an emergency (escaping from a burglary or kidnapping or involved in an accident. For deaths, to me, informing via text message would be enough because why cheat the living of sleep when nothing more can be done about the dead? While you’d want to know the news as soon as possible, surely a text would do too?).

This morning when I came in to work, I typed an email to my friend telling him what I felt. That as much as I valued and appreciated his help, I value my sleep more. I told him of missing the call on Big Brother. I ended the email by saying that I could understand the friend wanting to contact this other person in his own time zone but he should know beter than calling someone in a different time zone and robbing that person of sleep. And I don’t feel at all guilty about letting my displeasure known.

Oh, and I still haven’t the info needed at 4.20 am to pass back to R and A. Looks like the person who has the info doesn’t think it important enough to lose sleep over to provide it promptly.