I AM NOT THAT WOMAN
Lots of young people think that if a person is over the age of 60, that person is dementia adjacent. This is not true. Every human on the planet forgets things. Even 10 year olds forget things.
I have an oven that has the “self cleaning” function. I like that function. It makes housekeeping a lot easier. However, using the self cleaning function
- heats up the kitchen, so you have to clean your oven in wintertime
- uses up a lot of energy
Thus, I don’t clean my oven often. As a matter of fact, we have lived in this apartment for five years, and I have cleaned the oven once. But my daughter and our grandchildren are coming next week, so I am doing massive spring cleaning. My husband wonders why having a clean oven is necessary, because who on earth notices the inside of an oven, but I am on a mission to get this place in shape.
So. Night before last, after dinner, I locked the oven door and set it for self clean. The digital dashboard on the stove said that oven cleaning would take 4 hours. I hit start. This was at 8:15.
At 12:15, just as I was dozing off, after doing some late night furniture rearranging and moving various home accessories around for better impact, an intermittent beeping started.
I crossed my fingers that it was just a car in the parking lot, or something out in the hallway, and it would stop shortly. It didn’t. “I bet this is how they torture political prisoners,” I thought.
It went on for more than 5 minutes, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. So I got up and wandered around, looking for the beep’s origin. It didn’t seem to be in the hall, nor was it coming from the parking lot. I knew this was serious. I figured other tenants were probably upset at the sound and wanted it stopped.
So I went into the tv room, as not to bother my husband (who can sleep through a five alarm fire, so I was being polite for no reason), and I called the emergency service number, and a man who was obviously asleep moments before answered his pager.
I attempted to explain to him the annoying beeping, and as I talked to him, I walked into my living room. The living room is “open plan” with the kitchen. As I was telling the sleepy man what was going on, the beeping seemed louder, and I looked over at the stove.
I had forgotten that the stove beeps to announce to you that the oven is now CLEAN, and you should push the button to shut off the beeping. I pushed that button, the beeping stopped, and I proceeded to try to apologize to the service man, but something happened to our connection, and we were cut off…
He and the rest of the service team at our building I am sure had a “good laugh” at the stupid, probably demented woman on the fifth floor. I AM NOT THAT SORT OF WOMAN. Would you remember that the oven beeps when it is done self cleaning, if you had only done it once in 5 years? Of course not.
So I had to put in another service request, not an emergency one, of course. In this one, where there is a box that you fill in to describe what you need fixed, I wrote:
I want to apologize for waking up one of your service team members last night at 12:15. My daughter from California is coming, and I wanted to make sure that our apartment is clean, and so for the second time of our tenure, I set the oven to “self clean” mode at 8:15 last night. Since I had only done this once before, I had forgotten the fact that the oven makes a “beeping” sound when the clean cycle is finished. I hadn’t discovered this until I was already on the phone with the service person to report a mysterious beeping that was keeping me awake. I am sure I woke him up with my call. I disabled the beeping myself. I told the service man not to bother coming over. But in the middle of my conversation with him, our call was somehow disconnected. I hope he got right back to sleep. I am so sorry for waking him up for nothing.
This apology sounds totally sane, right?