The 6:30am delivery

It’s a rare occasion that Marcus takes a vacation day. His last out of office message was dated October 2019. Which means it’s kind of a big deal when he does take one. In the past few years, we’ve decided that birthdays are occasions that warrant a vacation day from work, and this year we went big—he took two days off work for his birthday.

On his actual birthday, I kept a strict and very packed schedule. Wake up. Presents. Brunch. Massage. Water park. (Yes we did. It was amazing.) Lunch. (A set meal with free flow coffee and ice cream for $8! Unheard of! The value!!) Back home for a 30-minute wash-up and dress-up. Happy hour. Fancy dinner on the 70th floor of a building downtown. With all the activity, we decided to have a solid sleep-in the next day. Marcus even used earplugs to get maximal sleep-in value. This was a plan.

Imagine my surprise to wake up by a pounding on the door. I look around, it’s still dark outside. Maybe I imagined it? Then more, long, unrelentless banging on the door. This is emergency-style pounding, super loud and prolonged. I jumped out of bed, seeing Marcus register my alert, and I race down the hallway to the door.

When I open the door, I come face to face with one of the night guards of our building. I whisper shout, "What's going on?!” To which he replies, “I’m delivering a package, madame.”

Now, I despise having my sleep interrupted. My attention to self-care is pretty decent, and far and away the best thing I have always maintained is my sleep schedule. I never pulled all-nighters in college, and I regularly get 8.5-9 hours of sleep a night. If I have one night of getting 6-7 hours of sleep, it hits my immune system and I feel shitty all day. Back in my summer camp days, I descended into a delirious mess as the days progressed and my sleep deficit grew. I was always a wreck at the end, and when I’d get home from camp, I’d slump into tears then fall asleep for a long, long time.

Given all of that. I get pissed when my sleep is rudely interrupted.

I was not a good model of kindness or understanding that morning. I gave the night guard a solid dressing down, with the most common refrain being, “Never, EVER knock on this door this early!” And while I’m not regularly a yeller, there was concern about the level of noise created in the hallway. And the potential of waking up the neighbors.

But seriously, who knocks on someone’s door at 6:30am?? Who does that??

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