With Paralyzed Arms I took on the Assault
Photo credit: Dideo
This morning I woke up at 4:00 a.m. to a screaming cellphone. It’s something that rarely happens—usually I’m awake long before the alarm goes off—but, I stayed up late last night in yet another attempt to watch a TiVo’d version of Napoleon Dynamite.
As you can imagine with a blog called Dead Rooster, my cellphone’s alarm ringtone is based on the crow of a rooster; an extremely loud rooster; a scientifically modified rooster built to launch a screech so annoying that it is easily on par with someone dragging a hard rusty rake across a dry blackboard.
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
My eyelids click open and I sit bolt-upright. My sandpaper eyes are set on stun. I’m disoriented. It’s dark. I scan the room for the phone…
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
I see the phone flicker as it crows. It’s on the bed no more than four inches from where my ear was. I go to grab it and…
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
My arms are numb. I must have slept on them funny and they are like the arms of a dead man. I desperately try to dangle my arms over the phone so I can pick it up and shut off the alarm before it screams again, but my fingers are operating like uncooked hotdogs.
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
The ringtone is rattling my skull and I’ve got to shut it off or I’m going to go insane. My hands are too numb to pick up the phone so I start jabbing randomly at buttons with my limp fingers to try and make it stop…
A woman’s voice comes out of my phone, “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
I lower my head close to the phone, “No,” I said. “My arms are paralyzed and…”
“Your arms are paralyzed?”
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
“No…I dialed by mistake. I slept on my arms wrong and my fingers are numb; I’m trying to shut off the alarm in my phone but my hands won’t work… “
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Hysterical laughter explodes from my phone speaker.
I focus on the red disconnect-button and get lucky—a direct hit. I hang up on the 911 operator. My hands are beginning to wake up, but they’re entering the horrible “tingle stage” with the sensation of a billion needles penetrating every finger. I find the alarm’s disable-button and strain to press it before the phone spits out another attack.
While all this is going on, the automatic coffee maker in the kitchen, which I had set to start brewing at 3:45 a. m. has begun to make coffee. Unfortunately, last night, I didn’t set the pot exactly under the dripper, so now, for the past 15 minutes it is secretly peeing all over the counter and floor.
Now, you would think I would be upset about the mess I have to clean up, but I’m not—at least, I wasn’t until the coffee pot gave off its happy little beep-beep-beep-beep to let me know the coffee was done.
THE COFFEE WAS NOT DONE…it was busy filling up the silverware drawer!
I clean up the mess and get another pot of coffee started. I walk over to my laptop and it says, “THREAT DETECTED.”
You’ve got to be kidding me!
What’s weird about that is I only use that laptop for writing. I don’t surf the internet; I don’t download anything; the only thing I do with it online is transfer what I’ve written to an online word processor. So, how do I get a virus? It doesn’t make sense.
So, I kill the virus with AVG and get into Microsoft Word and start to write what you are now reading while it’s still fresh in my mind. I look at my cellphone (which is how I tell time around here) to see how much time I have left before I need to start getting ready and notice that there is a missed call from early last night: “Hey, Bill, the customers canceled…go ahead and sleep in tomorrow.”
Grrr!
Dead Rooster is the online home of 
What a memorable start to your day. Things can only go downhill now.
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William McCamment
reply on October 16th, 2008 7:45 am:
Actually, things got better. I went back to bed and, after I woke up again, started another great day of my normally charmed life. LOL
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Good gravy, Rooster– that morning was definitely a cockadoodle-don’t. Extremely funny– but so, so wrong.
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William McCamment
reply on October 16th, 2008 7:46 am:
Went back to bed. Woke up in a much better frame of mind. Everything is A-OK. LOL
Thanks for the reddit!
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Jenn
reply on October 17th, 2008 6:41 am:
Hey, you bet. Hopefully it sent some decent traffic your way.
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Your day can only get better from here!
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William McCamment
reply on October 16th, 2008 7:50 am:
Knowing that Your Royal Fuzziness has stopped by made all the difference. Thanks!
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LOL hope things get better, just remember things happen in 3′s I wouldn’t leave the house at all
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William McCamment
reply on October 16th, 2008 9:55 am:
I’m not superstitious. Things like this rarely happen to me. I went back to bed and restarted my day–now everything’s coming-up Rooster!
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Hilarious, absolutely hilarious. My eyes are still watering from reading that. I will try to keep it in mind the next time I have a bad morning. Hope the rest of the day worked better for you.
- JobysBlog
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William McCamment
reply on October 16th, 2008 7:28 pm:
Thanks! My day turned-out pretty good (if it went any worse, I’d just have more material for a new blog post).
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Serious snickering…..gives me a Tim Conway/Harvey Corman dentist routine visual for some reason…Thanks!
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William McCamment
reply on October 16th, 2008 8:36 pm:
Haha! I felt like Tim Conway! But, when it was happening to me, it wasn’t funny! LOL
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That was a cute article and wow phones are my enemy….cell especially…..This was my first stop on your blog..thanks for visiting mine..
Dorothy from grammology
grammology.com
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William McCamment
reply on October 18th, 2008 3:08 pm:
Thanks, Dorothy!
I enjoyed your blog as well.
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Just awful. I try to turn the cell phone off now that I’m 2 years out of college and friends are all over the world in different time zones calling at all hours of the night. The day never goes well when you are woken up by the cell phone going off in the dark of the night. Numb arms probably make the situation that much worse since the ringing seems 10x louder in the quiet of the night and all you want to do is turn it off asap. Good post though, entertaining.
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William McCamment
reply on October 19th, 2008 4:57 pm:
I rarely get calls in the middle of the night (although, I’ve had a few). But, my everyday alarm clock broke so I’m forced to use the alarm feature in my cellphone.
Usually, I can just turn it off after the first crow, but my arms wouldn’t work. LOL
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Now that sounds like a bad day. But maybe things started looking up later. Did you go back to sleep?
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William McCamment
reply on October 19th, 2008 5:57 pm:
Yup. I went back to sleep, and when I woke-up, everything was back to normal (which for me, is usually pretty good!)
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sounds like SOMEONE has a case of the mondays!
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William McCamment
reply on October 20th, 2008 7:14 am:
Actually, I wrote that last Wednesday. LOL
I am currently updating my blog on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Eventually, I want to post every single day, but I’m not quite capable of that yet.
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So, what’s your point here? Numb arms? ringing phone? computer virus? coffee gone berserk? Did I miss the point here? That’s just another day in paradise where I live.
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William McCamment
reply on October 20th, 2008 3:15 pm:
Another day in paradise? If this was a normal day for me I’d consider using narcotics.
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OMG I think I just wet myself — just a little. That was too funny! I know what you mean about the spaghetti arms, but dang both at the same time? You do realize you are now water cooler fodder at the local 911 dispatch — and probably the police department as well. Hahaha. I hope your day got better — certainly couldn’t get worse. (knock on wood)
I’ve tagged you over at my place if you want to come check it out — pretty please!
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William McCamment
reply on October 20th, 2008 3:17 pm:
Thanks Angie!
I went back to bed and everything went back to normal.
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My butt falls asleep when I sit for too long. Odd huh…probably didn’t want to know that either. Oh well…
I can only picture the Who is Horton Hear’s a Who after he bails from the dentist office…lol
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